Goals and scope of the Archimedes Palimpsest transcriptions

Abstract

This article describes the editorial principles behind the transcriptions in both the digital and print components of the Archimedes Palimpsest publication. Care was taken in these transcriptions to record features of the text as written on the pages of the manuscript, such as scribal abbreviations, page layout, and diagrams. This approach was adopted with the understanding that the details about how a text is committed to physical form influence how it is read and interpreted over time. In this way it becomes possible for readers and scholars to access one further dimension of ancient mathematical thought and expression. The article is based on a talk given at a conference on ‘Editing Historical Mathematics’ in December 2011 in Oxford.

Notes

¹ The work of transcribing the text from the manuscript itself was executed by various teams of scholars. My task was to design the specific digital format to be used for the transcription files and to coordinate the production of the digital transcriptions based on the materials supplied by the scholars. These were edited for consistency and correctness. The digital transcriptions then served as the basis for the text and notes that are presented in the second volume of the print publication.

² For more detailed discussions concerning the history of the Archimedes Palimpsest project, see Noel (2011), and Netz and Noel (2007).

³ For now I limit the discussion to transcriptions, but many of the issues I discuss bear on critical editions as well.

⁴ Noel (2011, 2). Similarly also Emery et al. (2011, 222): ‘From the start, the owner's intent was to image the Archimedes Palimpsest in order to decipher as much of it as possible, to preserve the data generated by the project, and to make it universally available.'

⁵ Ideally we would have produced separate Heiberg transcriptions for the other non-unique treatises in Codex C, but due to practical constraints we only did this for On spiral lines. It is worth noting that the impossibility of fully determining Heiberg's readings of Codex C in the non-unique treatises would limit the usefulness of such transcriptions.

⁶ The transcriptions are Unicode text (UTF-8), encoded in XML that has been structured according to the TEI P5 guidelines. The specific conventions used are described in the dataset under /Documents/Internal/TEI_Encoding.txt.

⁷ Likewise it would be useful to have such information included in critical editions. Given the composite nature of critical editions, however, the details about how the information is to be recorded and presented are much more complicated than in the case of transcriptions.

⁸Johnson (2010) provides an extremely useful overview of scholarship on ancient reading practices (in particular the ‘silent reading debate’) and reorients the question in a more productive direction. I refer mainly to the first two chapters of this book. See also Johnson (2004).

⁹So for example, West (1973, 8) rightly points to ‘the interest and value that the study of such matters as the proclivities of scribes, and the processes governing the spread of texts at different periods, has in its own right.’

¹⁰Saito does, however, presuppose the goal of trying to draw closer to the authorial text. ‘If we seriously want to argue about the content of the Elements, we should first try to establish the original text through such manuscripts as we possess; and if we cannot establish it, we should at least recognize the extent to which the surviving text resembles the original’ (810). And ‘We also know that no Greek mathematical text is an autograph and are thus interested in textual traditions’ (825).