How a 13th-Century Monk Created a Prayer Manuscript by Writing Over—and Accidentally Preserving—Archimedes’ Groundbreaking Mathematical Works

How a 13th-Century Monk Created a Prayer Manuscript by Writing Over—and Accidentally Preserving—Archimedes’ Groundbreaking Mathematical Works

In Jerusalem of the year 1229, there lived a Greek Orthodox monk named Johannes Myronas. Needing some parchment for a prayer book, he grabbed some already-used pages, erased their existing content, and over them wrote down “prayers for the dead, prayers for repentance, blessings for the loaves at Easter, and even a prayer for those who were unreasonably excluded,” says math-and-science YouTuber Ben Syversen in the video above. Myronas may have f…