If someone told you that beneath a prayer book lay mathematics more than two thousand years old, would you believe it?

A medieval monk picked up a sheet of parchment covered in writing, scraped away the old words with a knife, and wrote new prayers over them.

He may never have imagined that what he had erased were the words of the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes.

Nor could he have imagined that this very act of scraping would let those words sleep in the dark for a few more centuries, until someone came looking for them again.

A Very Slender Thread

The wisdom of ancient Greece was never handed down by default.

In an age before paper was common, knowledge was recorded on papyrus and parchment. Civilizations declined, cities changed hands, and fire, damp and war followed one after another. A text only truly lived for as long as someone was willing to copy it once more.

The historian Paul Freedman once described the early medieval manuscript tradition as surviving by “so slender a thread.” Whether an author’s work endured could depend on a single moment, when someone, by candlelight, made one more copy of the only surviving copy.

So we have grown used to imagining monks as the night watchmen of ancient wisdom.

But that is only half of the story.

What They Guarded Was Not Always What We Imagine

Monks copied texts first for faith, worship and education, not to build an archive of classical civilization. Yet in copying grammar and rhetoric textbooks, and in reading and understanding Scripture, many ancient voices were carried into the future along the way.

Their intentions and their outcomes were never the same thing.

Medieval monasteries were not museums. Their libraries were living, working spaces, where choices were constantly being made. The scholar Krista A. Milne’s research suggests that the most endangered manuscripts were often those between fifty and two hundred years old: books with neither the aura of venerable antiquity nor the usefulness of a new one.

To the people of that time, a book we now treasure as “the sole witness of classical civilization” might simply have been an outdated, hard-to-read, space-consuming old volume.

The Palimpsest: One Parchment, Two Fates

Parchment is made from animal skin, and it was costly and time-consuming to produce. So people often scraped or washed away old writing and wrote something new in its place. Parchment overwritten in this way is called a palimpsest.

It was an act that seems cruel, yet it was not entirely destruction. The old words did not vanish completely. They withdrew beneath the new ones, like memories sinking underwater, leaving the faintest of traces.

The Archimedes Palimpsest is the best-known example. Centuries later, multispectral imaging and long years of scholarship allowed the hidden text to emerge again.

The Sinai Palimpsests Project at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has also uncovered hidden texts in many languages beneath the manuscripts of Saint Catherine’s Monastery, including ancient Greek medical writings previously unknown.

What was erased and what was kept lived together on the very same sheet of parchment.

In Bulgaria, I Met Another Kind of Rewriting

In May 2023, during a cultural week in Bulgaria, I stopped in front of street exhibition panels showing pages from eleventh-century monastic manuscripts.

It was the world of the Glagolitic alphabet, written by Slavic monks within the Eastern Church tradition. The script is generally believed to have been created by the two monks Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius, who are remembered as the fathers of Slavic literacy.

The Zograph Gospel lost eighteen leaves as early as the eleventh century. The new pages the monks added were poorer in quality than the old ones, yet they allowed the book to remain in use. And at the edges and bottom of the new leaves, earlier writing is still visible to the naked eye, like a voice that has been washed away but refuses to leave. The panel described it as “a manuscript concealed inside another manuscript.”

But what held my attention most was a set of small slips. Attached to the back of a psalter at Saint Catherine’s Monastery, they record remedies for various diseases. Among the early Glagolitic manuscripts that survive, they are the only one with non-religious content.

The scribe “thought” in Cyrillic, and in the final lines slipped, without noticing, into the other alphabet.
The panel asks: can you read the word?
The word means warm.
A thousand years ago, someone wrote on a tiny scrap of parchment how to make the body warm again, and halfway through, accidentally changed scripts.

Hostility, or Circumstance?

It is easy to read these scrape marks as “religion oppressing pagan civilization.” And indeed, some medieval Christians were wary of ancient philosophy that conflicted with doctrine.

But the evidence does not support the claim that monks systematically destroyed classical literature. Parchment was expensive, needs changed, and old books were hard to repair. These practical reasons often counted for more than ideology.

A study published in The Medieval Review found that, among the early medieval overwritten texts it examined, about 27.5 percent came from classical authors, while the rest included the Bible, the writings of the Church Fathers, liturgical books and Roman legal texts.

This does not look like a purge of pagan culture. It looks more like a long and complicated process of selection. Some texts disappeared because no one thought them worth copying again. Some were replaced by newer versions. Some were lost to accident. And some had to give way to more urgent needs.

Forgetting is rarely a single decision. It is usually a series of small, reasonable trade-offs.

Survival Was Never Guaranteed

Every ancient manuscript that has reached us passed through a chain of copying, collecting, lending and safekeeping, and through a considerable amount of luck. Far more manuscripts have vanished for good, and today’s scholars can only try to rebuild those lost libraries from catalogues, quotations and scattered fragments.

And today, we finally have new eyes. Multispectral photography can make writing beneath the ink reappear, and the comparison of fragments can help broken texts be recognized once more. They cannot give back every lost word, but they are enough to turn a seemingly ordinary prayer book into a window onto the ancient mind.

In the World of Arsinoë’s Scents

When we compose a fragrance, we often think of a canvas. And a layered perfume is more like the parchment of a palimpsest.

Ancient wisdom has always survived in this way. It does not rely on one great act of preservation, but on generation after generation of people who, with understanding and honesty, keep copying it forward.

When we turn the myths of ancient Greece into something that can be breathed, we are not duplicating a sacred relic. We are simply trying to write the stories of long ago once more, on today’s parchment.

Perhaps you, too, have something that has been scraped away.
A forgotten memory.
A self that time has washed pale.

Don’t be quick to say it has disappeared.
History tells us that the most precious things are often not truly lost.
They have only withdrawn to a deeper place, waiting for a light.

This article was inspired by “How Medieval Monks Both Preserved and Destroyed Ancient Greek Knowledge” by Philip Chrysopoulos, published in Greek Reporter, and draws on research on the Archimedes Palimpsest, the Sinai Palimpsests Project, and manuscript materials from the exhibition panels at the Bulgarian cultural week.