Palimpsest

A palimpsest (from the Greek 'scraped again') is a parchment manuscript from which the original text has been scraped or washed off in order to write a new text in its place. Because parchment was expensive, old manuscripts in the Middle Ages were often 'overwritten' in this way, destroying earlier texts for the sake of new ones. Yet traces of the original writing often show through; modern methods (ultraviolet and multispectral scanning, special photography) make it possible to read the erased text, so palimpsests have become a valuable source for recovering lost monuments of antiquity and the Middle Ages. A famous example is the Archimedes Palimpsest, beneath whose liturgical text lost works of Archimedes were discovered. In a figurative sense, 'palimpsest' became a metaphor for the layered nature of culture, text, and memory, through which the past 'shows'; in this sense the concept is used by Gérard Genette ('Palimpsests') and theorists of intertextuality.