What an Auction House Sold Without Fully Knowing

On 28 October 1998, a battered Byzantine prayer book crossed the block at Christie's in New York and sold for two million dollars to a bidder who chose to remain anonymous. The buyer was not paying for the prayer book. Everyone in the room understood the real object of value was the faint, mostly illegible traces of ancient Greek mathematics still visible beneath its liturgical text, the same erased Archimedes treatises Johan Ludvig Heiberg had partially read almost a century earlier before the manuscript disappeared from scholarly circulation.

What the anonymous owner did next mattered as much as the purchase itself. Rather than keeping the manuscript in private hands, unstudied, the buyer deposited it with the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore in 1999 and funded a conservation and imaging project that ran for more than a decade, using multispectral imaging and, for the most stubbornly hidden pages, X-ray fluorescence at a particle accelerator to read text no eye could recover directly. The project recovered far more of Archimedes' treatises than Heiberg had ever seen, along with the previously unsuspected texts of a lost speech by the orator Hyperides hiding in the same recycled parchment, and published everything openly online, turning a private acquisition into one of the more generous acts of modern manuscript scholarship.