Palimpsest

A palimpsest is a manuscript page, scroll, or book that has been written on, scraped off, and used again. The word palimpsest comes from two Greek roots (palin + psEn) meaning "scraped again." Romans wrote on wax-coated tablets that could be reused, and a passing use of the rather bookish term "palimpsest" by Cicero seems to refer to this practice.

Some famous palimpsests

• The Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris: portions of the Old and New Testaments in Greek, attributed to the 5th century, are covered with works of Ephraem the Syrian in a hand of the 12th century
• Among the Syriac manuscripts obtained from the Nitrian desert in Egypt, British Museum, London: important Greek texts
• A volume containing a work of Severus of Antioch of the beginning of the 9th century is written on palimpsest leaves taken from 6th century manuscripts of the Iliad and the Gospel of St Luke, both of the 6th century, and the Euclid's Elements of the 7th or 8th century, British Museum
• A double palimpsest, in which a text of St John Chrysostom, in Syriac, of the 9th or 10th century, covers a Latin grammatical treatise in a cursive hand of the 6th century, which in its turn has displaced the Latin annals of the historian Granius Licinianus, of the 5th century, British Museum.
• The Ambrosian Plautus, in rustic capitals, of the 4th or 5th century, re-written with portions of the Bible in the 9th century, Ambrosian Library
• Cicero, De republica in uncials, of the 4th century, covered by St Augustine on the Psalms, of the 7th century, Vatican Library
• Codex Theodosianus of Turin, of the 5th or 6th century
• the Fasti Consulares of Verona, of A.D. 486
• the Arian fragment of the Vatican, of the 5th century
• the letters of Cornelius Fronto
• the Archimedes Palimpsest, a work of the great Syracusan mathematician copied onto parchment in the 10th century and overwritten by a liturgical text in the 12th century
• Sinaitic Palimpsest
• the unique copy of a Greek grammatical text composed by Herodian for the emperor Marcus Aurelius in the 2nd century, preserved in the Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna