| In the beginning, all scripts were hand-made. |
| I'm referring to Europe during the Middle Ages. |
| Certainly not the beginning of all things, but it's where we're starting today. |
| Books, scrolls, notes, letters to the king, |
| they were all penned by hand, usually on parchment with a quill and ink. |
| Parchment is an animal skin that had been stretched thin and dried under tension. |
| This treatment of a hide will make it very thin, flexible, and easy to write on and transport. |
| During the 1400's, papers became the more commonly used material for books in Europe, |
| but before that, it was parchment. |
| Parchment is durable, unlike paper, and could be reused. |
| Reusability was nice because writing supplies were in short supply and were quite valuable. |
| It was fairly common for religious leaders to be the ones who produced written work. |
| To be able to read, let alone write, one had to either be born high-class, |
| a merchant, involved in your local religion or both very lucky and very hard-working. |
| Anyway, scribes could re-use parchment by rubbing away the ink from parchment previously used for less important manuscripts. |
| Using the parchment again was called Palimpsest. |
| The original text on a Palimpsest could sometimes be recovered. |
| There were two ways to remove the ink to reuse parchment. |
| The first is to simply scrape away the ink with something abrasive. |
| This removes a layer or two of parchment as well, |
| and it completely wiped out any writing that could have been on them. |
| However, before that method became widespread, |
| the original ink was normally washed away in a bath of milk. |
| This technique removed the letters, but over time they might reappear. |
| Actually, it might reappear with such clarity |
| that scholars would be able to make out and translate the original text |
| from where it laid under the new text. |
| One of the most notorious examples is the Archimedes' palimpsest. |
| Archimedes is a fairly well-known name at this point. |
| He is heralded by many as one of the greatest Mathematicians who ever lived. |
| Unfortunately, he lived in Greece around 200 B.C.E. |
| and many of his scholarly works have been lost, |
| most devastatingly, his keystone work called "The Method". |
| In 1998, just 17 years ago, |
| a book of prayers from that time period was sold for millions of dollars - |
| far more than one would normally pay for a damaged, 12th century book at an art auction. |
| Sure, it may have been beautifully penned, but why so costly? |
| Well, it had been discovered that the book was a palimpsest, |
| and under the prayers on the surface was a manually penned script |
| of Mathematical theorems and diagrams from Archimedes himself. |
| His writings were originally on papyrus, |
| which is a form of paper made from woven and processed river reeds. |
| Around the 10th century, a scribe must have made a copy on parchment of some of his texts and diagrams. |
| Their logs included what had long been lost to time, the entirety of "The Method". |
| In the 12th century, about 200 years later, |
| the animal-skin log of Archimedes' most important work was cleaned with milk and used again to write down prayers. |
| The page, the parchment itself was preserved well enough for the original ink to reappear after hundreds of years. |
| It wasn't until 1906 that the prayer book was found by a scholar |
| who could realize it was a palimpsest. |
| Upon further analysis, that resurfaced layer of text could only be "The Method". |
| The greatest mathematician's finest work had finally been discovered after nearly 6 centuries, for the first time. |