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Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Photo: New Layer of Ancient Greek Writings Detected in Medieval Book


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Abigail Quandt of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, places a page of the Archimedes Palimpsest into an x-ray scanner at Stanford University's Linear Accelerator Center on August 4, 2006.

Since 2002 researchers have been using a scanning technique called multispectral imaging to reveal older texts hidden under the words of a medieval Christian prayer book.

The latest scans show commentary likely written in the third century A.D. on a work by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.

Photograph by Paul Sakuma/AP