The overwritten parchment, now known as the Archimedes Palimpsest, wasn’t rediscovered until 1906, when Danish philologist Johan Ludvig Heiberg spotted faint Greek characters beneath a layer of Christian texts. The Erased Genius of ArchimedesBorn in Syracuse around 287 BC, Archimedes is often celebrated for his work on buoyancy and levers. A typical page from the Archimedes Palimpsest. The text of the prayer book is seen from top to bottom, the original Archimedes manuscript is seen as fainter text below it running from left to right. “We lost centuries,” said Dr. Reviel Netz, a classics professor at Stanford University and co-editor of the Archimedes Palimpsest Project.