William Noel, a dapper 46-year-old Cambridge Ph.D. with a slightly roguish charm, seems like a hero out of The Da Vinci Code. And that hasn’t escaped his notice. “At some point, it began to feel like a Dan Brown novel,” he says. Noel, the director of the Archimedes Palimpsest project and the curator of manuscripts and rare books at the Walters Art Museum, is describing his team’s long quest to preserve, image, and interpret lost writings of the ancient Greek scientist Archimedes to a crowd of well-heeled donors, for what must feel like the thousandth time. Like The Da Vinci Code, the story is full of high-tech gadgets and globetrotting detective/scholars, struggling to uncover ancient secrets.

During the presentation, Noel and Abigail Quandt, senior conservator of manuscripts and rare books at the Walters (á la the technically brilliant and extraordinarily ethical sidekick in the novel version), occasionally point to the artifacts and images that make up the new Walters exhibition, Lost and Found: The Secrets of Archimedes. But it is not really a visual show. After all, Noel himself calls the moldy old codex (a book made of goat-hide parchment) “ugly” and, in his 2007 book The Archimedes Codex, wrote: “You cannot even see what is interesting about the Archimedes Palimpsest.” The story must be told.

Noel himself first told it in a film back in 1999, when the Walters originally acquired the codex. Since then, the BBC, PBS, and nearly every major magazine or newspaper (including this one [“Reading Between the Lines,” Arts and Entertainment, Nov. 21, 2007]) have all related updated versions of this same story.

A scribe in Constantinople copied the texts of Archimedes onto these particular pages sometime in the tenth century. (The original Archimedes papyri are lost to history.) In 1229, another scribe washed off Archimedes’ writing—along with that of several other authors—and copied prayers over them. (The word “palimpsest” means writing over other writing.) Quandt says parchment was widely recycled because “it took a whole herd [of goats] to get enough hide to create a book.”

Rather than destroying Archimedes’ texts, this scribe inadvertently—and invisibly—preserved the only copy of this portion of his work. In 1907, a Danish scholar named John Ludwig Heiberg noticed the Archimedes text beneath the prayers. But there was much Heiberg could not decipher or even see with his magnifying glass. During World War II, several pages were defaced by forgeries of medieval miniatures of the Apostles. (Noel hypothesizes that the forgeries were a desperate attempt by someone to raise money and escape from the Nazis.)

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