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The great texts of the ancient world

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don't survive to us in their original form.

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They survive because medieval scribes copied them

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and copied them and copied them.

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And so it is with Archimedes,

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the great Greek mathematician.

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Everything we know about Archimedes as a mathematician

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we know about because of just three books,

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and they're called A, B and C.

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And A was lost by an Italian humanist in 1564.

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And B was last heard of in the Pope's Library

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about a hundred miles north of Rome in Viterbo in 1311.

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Now Codex C was only discovered in 1906,

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and it landed on my desk in Baltimore

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on the 19th of January, 1999.

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And this is Codex C here.

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Now Codex C is actually buried in this book.

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It's buried treasure.

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Because this book is actually a prayer book.

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It was finished by a guy called Johannes Myrones

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on the 14th of April, 1229.

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And to make his prayer book he used parchment.

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But he didn't use new parchment,

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he used parchment recycled from earlier manuscripts,

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and there were seven of them.

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And Archimedes Codex C was just one of those seven.

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He took apart the Archimedes manuscript and the other seven manuscripts.

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He erased all of their texts,

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and then he cut the sheets down in the middle,

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he shuffled them up,

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and he rotated them 90 degrees,

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and he wrote prayers on top of these books.

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And essentially these seven manuscripts

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disappeared for 700 years, and we have a prayer book.

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The prayer book was discovered by this guy,

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Johan Ludvig Heiberg, in 1906.

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And with just a magnifying glass,

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he transcribed as much of the text as he could.

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And the thing is that he found two texts in this manuscript

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that were unique texts.

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They weren't in A and B at all;

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they were completely new texts by Archimedes,

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and they were called "The Method" and "The Stomachion."

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And it became a world famous manuscript.

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Now it should be clear by now

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that this book is in bad condition.

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It got in worse condition in the 20th century

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after Heiberg saw it.

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Forgeries were painted over it,

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and it suffered very badly from mold.

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This book is the definition of a write-off.

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It's the sort of book

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that you thought would be in an institution.

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But it's not in an institution,

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it was bought by a private owner in 1998.

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Why did he buy this book?

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Because he wanted to make that which was fragile safe.

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He wanted to make that which was unique ubiquitous.

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He wanted to make that which was expensive free.

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And he wanted to do this as a matter of principle.

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Because not many people are really going to read Archimedes in ancient Greek,

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but they should have the chance to do it.

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So he gathered around himself the friends of Archimedes,

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and he promised to pay for all the work.

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And it was an expensive job,

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but actually it wouldn't be as much as you think

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because these people, they didn't come from money,

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they came from Archimedes.

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And they came from all sorts of different backgrounds.

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They came from particle physics,

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they came from classical philology,

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they came from book conservation,

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they came from ancient mathematics,

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they came from data management,

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they came from scientific imaging and program management.

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And they got together to work on this manuscript.

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The first problem was a conservation problem.

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And this is the sort of thing that we had to deal with:

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There was glue on the spine of the book.

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And if you look at this photograph carefully,

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the bottom half of this is rather brown.

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And that glue is hide glue.

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Now if you're a conservator,

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you can take off this glue reasonably easily.

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The top half is Elmer's wood glue.

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It's polyvinyl acetate emulsion

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that doesn't dissolve in water once it's dry.

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And it's much tougher than the parchment that it was written on.

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And so before we could start imaging Archimedes,

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we had to take this book apart.

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So it took four years to take apart.

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And this is a rare action shot, ladies and gentlemen.

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(Laughter)

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Another thing is that we had to get rid of all the wax,

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because this was used in the liturgical services

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of the Greek Orthodox Church

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and they'd used candle wax.

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And the candle wax was dirty,

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and we couldn't image through the wax.

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So very carefully we had to mechanically scrape off all the wax.

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It's hard to tell you exactly

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how bad this condition of this book is,

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but it came out in little bits very often.

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And normally in a book, you wouldn't worry about the little bits,

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but these little bits might contain unique Archimedes text.

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So, tiny fragments

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we actually managed to put back in the right place.

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Then, having done that, we started to image the manuscript.

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And we imaged the manuscript

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in 14 different wavebands of light.

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Because if you look at something in different wavebands of light,

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you see different things.

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And here is an image of a page

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imaged in 14 different wavebands of light.

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But none of them worked.

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So what we did was we processed the images together,

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and we put two images into one blank screen.

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And here are two different images of the Archimedes manuscript.

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And the image on the left

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is the normal red image.

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And the image on the right is an ultraviolet image.

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And in the image on the right

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you might be able to see some of the Archimedes writing.

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If you merge them together into one digital canvas,

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the parchment is bright in both images

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and it comes out bright.

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The prayer book is dark in both images

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and it comes out dark.

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The Archimedes text is dark in one image and bright in another.

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And it'll come out dark but red,

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and then you can start to read it rather clearly.

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And that's what it looks like.

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Now that's a before and after image,

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but you don't read the image on the screen like that.

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You zoom in and you zoom in

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and you zoom in and you zoom in,

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and you can just read it now.

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(Applause)

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If you process the same two images in a different way,

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you can actually get rid of the prayer book text.

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And this is terribly important,

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because the diagrams in the manuscript

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are the unique source for the diagrams

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that Archimedes drew in the sand in the fourth century B.C.

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And there we are, I can give them to you.

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With this kind of imaging --

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this kind of infrared, ultraviolet, invisible light imaging --

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we were never going to image through the gold ground forgeries.

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How were we going to do that?

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Well we took the manuscript,

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and we decided to image it in X-ray fluorescence imaging.

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So an X-ray comes in in the diagram on the left

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and it knocks out an electron from the inner shell of an atom.

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And that electron disappears.

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And as it disappears, an electron from a shell farther out

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jumps in and takes its place.

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And when it takes its place,

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it sheds electromagnetic radiation.

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It sheds an X-ray.

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And this X-ray is specific in its wavelength

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to the atom that it hits.

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And what we wanted to get

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was the iron.

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Because the ink was written in iron.

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And if we can map

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where this X-ray that comes out, where it comes from,

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we can map all the iron on the page,

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then theoretically we can read the image.

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The thing is that you need a very powerful light source to do this.

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So we took it to the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory

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in California,

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which is a particle accelerator.

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Electrons go around one way,

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positrons go around the other.

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They meet in the middle,

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and they create subatomic particles

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like the charm quark and the tau lepton.

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Now we weren't actually going to put Archimedes in that beam.

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But as the electrons go round at the speed of light,

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they shed X-rays.

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And this is the most powerful light source in the solar system.

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This is called synchrotron radiation,

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and it's normally used to look at things

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like proteins and that sort of thing.

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But we wanted it to look at atoms, at iron atoms,

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so that we could read the page from before and after.

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And lo and behold, we found that we could do it.

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It took about 17 minutes to do a single page.

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So what did we discover?

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Well one of the unique texts in Archimedes

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is called "The Stomachion."

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And this didn't exist in Codices A and B.

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And we knew that it involved this square.

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And this is a perfect square,

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and it's divided into 14 bits.

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But no one knew what Archimedes was doing with these 14 bits.

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And now we think we know.

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He was trying to work out

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how many ways you can recombine those 14 bits

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and still make a perfect square.

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Anyone want to guess the answer?

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It's 17,152 divided into 536 families.

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And the important point about this

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is that it's the earliest study in combinatorics in mathematics.

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And combinatorics is a wonderful and interesting branch of mathematics.

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The really astonishing thing though about this manuscript

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is that we looked at the other manuscripts

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that the palimpsester had made,

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the scribe had made his book out of,

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and one of them was a manuscript containing text by Hyperides.

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Now Hyperides was an Athenian orator from the fourth century B.C.

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He was an exact contemporary of Demosthenes.

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And in 338 B.C. he and Demosthenes together

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decided that they wanted to stand up

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to the military might of Philip of Macedon.

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So Athens and Thebes went out to fight Philip of Macedon.

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This was a bad idea,

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because Philip of Macedon had a son called Alexander the Great,

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and they lost the battle of Chaeronea.

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Alexander the Great went on to conquer the known world;

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Hyperides found himself on trial for treason.

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And this is the speech that he gave when he was on trial --

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and it's a great speech:

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"Best of all," he says, "is to win.

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But if you can't win,

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then you should fight for a noble cause,

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because then you'll be remembered.

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Consider the Spartans.

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They won enumerable victories,

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but no one remembers what they are

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because they were all fought for selfish ends.

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The one battle that the Spartans fought that everybody remembers

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is the the battle of Thermopylae

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where they were butchered to a man,

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but fought for the freedom of Greece."

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It was such a great speech

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that the Athenian law courts let him off.

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He lived for another 10 years,

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then the Macedonian faction caught up with him.

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They cut out his tongue in mockery of his oratory,

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and no one knows what they did with his body.

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So this is the discovery of a lost voice from antiquity,

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speaking to us, not from the grave,

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because his grave doesn't exist,

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but from the Athenian law courts.

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Now I should say at this point

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that normally when you're looking

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at medieval manuscripts that have been scraped off,

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you don't find unique texts.

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And to find two in one manuscript is really something.

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To find three is completely weird.

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And we found three.

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Aristotle's "Categories"

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is one of the foundational texts of Western philosophy.

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And we found a third century A.D. commentary on it,

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possibly by Galen and probably by Porphyry.

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Now all this data that we collected,

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all the images, all the raw images,

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all the transcriptions that we made and that sort of thing

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have been put online under a Creative Commons license

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for anyone to use for any commercial purpose.

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(Applause)

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Why did the owner of the manuscript do this?

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He did this because he understands data as well as books.

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Now the thing to do with books,

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if you want to ensure their long-term utility,

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is to hide them away in closets

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and let very few people look at them.

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The thing to do with data, if you want it to survive,

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is to let it out and have everybody have it

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with as little control on that data as possible.

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And that's what he did.

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And institutions can learn from this.

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Because institutions at the moment

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confine their data with copyright restrictions and that sort of thing.

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And if you want to look at medieval manuscripts on the Web,

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at the moment you have to go to the National Library of Y's site

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or the University Library of X's site,

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which is about the most boring way

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in which you can deal with digital data.

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What you want to do is to aggregate it all together.

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Because the Web of the ancient manuscripts of the future

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isn't going to be built by institutions.

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It's going to be built by users,

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by people who get this data together,

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by people who want to aggregate all sorts of maps

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from wherever they come from,

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all sorts of medieval romances

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from wherever they come from,

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people who just want to curate their own glorious selection

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of beautiful things.

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And that is the future of the Web.

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And it's an attractive and beautiful future,

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if only we can make it happen.

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Now we at the Walters Art Museum have followed this example,

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and we have put up all our manuscripts on the Web

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for people to enjoy --

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all the raw data, all the descriptions, all the metadata.

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under a Creative Commons license.

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Now the Walters Art Museum is a small museum

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and it has beautiful manuscripts,

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but the data is fantastic.

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And the result of this

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is that if you do a Google search on images right now

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and you type in "Illuminated manuscript Koran" for example,

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24 of the 28 images you'll find come from my institution.

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(Applause)

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Now, let's think about this for a minute.

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What's in it for the institution?

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There are all sorts of things that are in it for the institution.

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You can talk about the Humanities and that sort of thing,

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but let's talk about selfish things.

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Because what's really in it for the institution is this:

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Now why do people go to the Louvre?

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They go to see the Mona Lisa.

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Why do they go to see the Mona Lisa?

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Because they already know what she looks like.

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And they know what she looks like

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because they've seen pictures of her absolutely everywhere.

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Now, there is no need

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for these restrictions at all.

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And I think that institutions should stand up

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and release all their data under unrestricted licenses,

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and it would be a great benefit to everybody.

325
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Why don't we just let everybody have access to this data

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and curate their own collection

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of ancient knowledge and wonderful and beautiful things

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and increase the beauty and the cultural significance

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of the Internet.

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Thank you very much indeed.

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(Applause)