Palimpsest
/ˈpælɪmpsɛst/noun
A manuscript whose original writing was scraped off so the surface could be reused, with the earlier text still faintly present.
The Greek roots
Literally: “scraped again”
The story of the word
Parchment was expensive and monks were thrifty, so old books were washed and scraped and written over. The best-known case is a tenth-century copy of Archimedes that was taken apart in the thirteenth century, scraped, folded and rebound as a prayer book; ultraviolet and X-ray imaging from the 1990s onward recovered the Method, a work known from no other source. The word now gets used for anything showing its earlier layers, from a city plan to a scarred landscape.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
Same family
In a sentence
The lower text of the palimpsest turned out to be sixth-century.
The high street is a palimpsest of failed shopfronts, each sign painted over the last.