Modern technology is helping us bump out more about medical specialty ’s beginning and how raw science develop and spread across the ancient world .
Technical experts , scientist , and scholar at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource ( SSRL ) are using gamey - powered decade - re beams to scan and canvas an ancient text known as the Galen Palimpsest . On the control surface of the animal fell sheepskin is an 11th - 100 textual matter outlining psalms for the week . Past that , scientists have detect a sixth - century medical text that had been scraped off and compose over to make room for the biblical writing .
At a time when report and writing utensils were backbreaking to fall by , scribes would often scrape off original text and write over it , a Medieval shape of recycling known today as a palimpsest .
“ Underneath the text is a very faint and erased school text that you may only see by using this X - beam sign , ” physicist Uwe Bergmann told IFLScience .
The squad has advance a proficiency first developed 12 age ago . As the inks used to drop a line on the manuscript have unlike writing , they answer differently to an X - irradiation beam directed onto them . These differences allow the scientist to distinguish between them .
“ This very o.k. beam creates a two - dimensional image like a map , which contains in the fluorescent signals the elements of what is on each page , ” say Bergmann . “ By doing that , even if the ink is erased , there are still some traces of the alloy in the ink that we can bring out . ”
This engineering , bonk as X - rayfluorescence imaging , has been around for more than a 10 . However , it ’s the team ’s power to rapidly convince the manuscript into in high spirits - resolution images that sets this projection apart . Bergmann say in the past times they were only able-bodied to record around 10 MB of data point . They are now able to record up to six gigabytes . Each of the 26 Page takes around 10 hours to convert into files that can be shared with assimilator online .
Written in ancient Syriac , researchers consider the ancient school text let in the oldest - known copy ofOn the Mixtures and Powers of Simple Drugs , a aesculapian text written by Greco - Romanist author , philosopher , and physicianGalen of Pergamon , who expire in 210 CE . Credited with being the first to look into the body through dissection , Galen bring forth theories that master European music for 1,500 years . He even give away that arteria carry blood and that pee is formed in the kidney .
The palimpsest first sprain up in Germany in the other 1900s , according to an emailed statement from the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory . Research indicate it came from St Catherine ’s Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula , Egypt . Almost a century later , a page of the 1,000 - class - sometime text was find in a loaded collector ’s museum of rare scientific stuff in Baltimore . The find launched aglobal huntfor other lost leaf , which culminated in 2013 with the digitization of the last rediscovered Sir Frederick Handley Page in Paris .
Now , almost two millennia subsequently , Galen ’s textual matter continue to circulate and advance the world of science .
