Enhancement of overwritten text in the Archimedes Palimpsest
2008
The Archimedes Palimpsest is a thousand-year old overwritten parchment manuscript, containing several treatises by
Archimedes. Eight hundred years ago, it was erased, overwritten and bound into a prayer book. In the middle of the
twentieth century, a few pages were painted over with forged Byzantine icons. Today, a team of imagers, scholars and
conservators is recovering and interpreting the erased Archimedes writings. Two different methods have been used to
reveal the erased undertext. Spectral information is obtained by illuminating the manuscript with narrow-band light from
the ultraviolet, through the visible wavebands and into the near-infrared wavelengths. Characters are extracted by
combining pairs of spectral bands or by spectral unmixing techniques adapted from remote sensing. Lastly, since all of
the text was written with iron gall ink, X-Ray fluorescence has been used to expose the ink underneath the painted icons.
This paper describes the use of color to enhance the erased text in the processed images and to make it visible to the
scholars. Special pseudocolor techniques have been developed that significantly increase the contrast of the erased text
and make it possible to be read by the scholars despite the presence of the obscuring, overlaid text.
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