The Archimedes Palimpsest is a bit of a celebrity text in the history of science, the subject of television documentaries and of a best-selling book by two of the authors of the volumes under review. Its story is, by now, well known. In 1906 the Danish scholar Johan Ludvig Heiberg was told that a manuscript in (then) Constantinople might contain some ancient mathematical works. Heiberg had already edited, among other things, the extant works of the third-century BC Greek mathematician Archimedes and was a recognized expert in the field. His trip to Constantinople proved fruitful – under the first layer of the manuscript, which was a palimpsest, i.e. a manuscript written on top of ‘recycled’ manuscript parchment, were works by Archimedes. In particular, Heiberg found a work called Method, whose existence had only been known through a passing mention by Hero of Alexandria. Heiberg transcribed what he could of the barely legible text, and published the Method in 1907. The palimpsest then disappeared for many years, until it surfaced in 1998, when it was put up for auction, and bought by an anonymous North American billionnaire.

The anonymous new owner of the palimpsest engaged the services of teams of scientists and philologists, who, after many years of pioneering work, have now produced a full edition of the texts hidden under the top layer of writing: they include a lost commentary on Aristotle's Categories; long segments of speeches by the fourth-century BC Greek orator Hyperides, so far only known through fragments; and, most importantly for the readers of this journal, some treatises by Archimedes.

Archimedes' works are known through other manuscripts, but the palimpsest contains the only text of Method and Stomachion, as well as the only Greek text of Floating Bodies. The Stomachion appears to be a rare ancient example of combinatorics, while the Method was written by Archimedes in order to explain how he had arrived at some of his most remarkable geometrical discoveries. Its basic principle is to find the volume or area of a geometrical body by balancing it against another geometrical body whose volume or area is known. Additionally, the geometrical bodies in question are considered as the sum of an infinite number of lines or planes, and the resulting ‘infinitesimals’ are put in proportion to each other and to other magnitudes.

These two volumes are a very important publication: the palimpsest is remarkable not only for its contents, but also for its history, from its production, perhaps in Palestine, to its adventures at the hands of dodgy dealers in Turkey and France in the early nineteenth century, to the attention and ingenuity lavished on it in this latest phase of its history. The first volume sets new standards in the edition of ancient texts, by providing as full information as one would ever wish on how the evidence for the edition of the texts, provided in the second volume with full critical and philological apparatus and good pictures of the palimpsest, was obtained. There is, regrettably, no English translation of the texts, but there is a website (www.archimedespalimpsest.org) which provides open access to all the digital data. Be warned, however: having the digital images in front of you, whether they have been produced by x-ray, text-recognition software or other sophisticated imaging technologies, does not necessarily mean that you will be able to decipher the (often very badly damaged) text for yourself, unless you are a palaeographer with very keen eyesight.

In Volume 1, each of the various experts involved in retrieving the text takes the reader into their area of speciality, and accounts for their decisions, for their choices of one technology over another, exploring what technologies were available and through what avenues, even reporting the occasional setbacks. It feels very much like a collective, communal enterprise, not just within single disciplines, but also between the sciences and the humanities. Indeed, the text of the commentary to Aristotle's Categories was produced through a multiple effort, rather than at the hands of a single individual. This may well be the future of scholarship.

At the same time, some questions inevitably spring to mind. For instance, petty person that I am, I could not help wondering about money. Obviously, all this could not have been achieved had the owner of the palimpsest not been a billionnaire. In the current financial climate, it is a safe bet that no academic institution – definitely no academic institution accountable to the taxpayer – could have afforded the time and effort invested in bringing these texts to light. Thus (I could not help wondering) is this, too, the future of scholarship? Is it going to be dependent on the patronage of enlightened billionnaires?

Even more pettily, I could not help but wonder, given how many resources were funnelled into this, was the end result worth it? Perhaps not dissimilar considerations underlie the authors' evident concern to show that the techniques developed to decipher the palimpsest can be, are being, and will be applied to other texts and other authors as well. There is also a great emphasis throughout the first volume on making the work process transparent and accessible to as wide a public as possible – an emphasis reflected not so much in the price of the two volumes, presumably aimed mostly at libraries, as in the website. The public which does not read Greek, however, will have to wait for an accessible translation some time soon, or fall back on Thomas Heath's old English version, or indeed any of the more recent translations into other European languages.

With regard to the ‘old’ Archimedes versus the ‘new’ Archimedes, I was intrigued by Reviel Netz's piece in the first volume – perhaps the most relevant chapter in this publication for the readers of BJHS. Netz starts with some very interesting, and very modern, or even postmodern, remarks about the multiplicity of meanings of the text, which can fairly be described as not one but many. The next page, however, emphasizes Archimedes' ‘modernity’, the fact that he foreshadows some important and much later mathematical discoveries, in a way that feels rather anachronistic. Netz also carefully shows how the new reading of the manuscript differs from the old one: for instance, there are radical new insights into the way Archimedes handled ‘infinitesimals’, and into his heuristics, a process to describe which Netz inaugurates the term ‘suggestivity’ (p. 309). It is a thrill-packed ride into the mind of a mathematical genius, but at times I felt that Netz's comments on some of Heiberg's editorial choices verged on the harsh, and unnecessarily so in my view. Was there a concern to show that all the work expended on the palimpsest has borne new, extraordinary fruit? Netz need not have worried – I think it is obvious that the new evidence goes beyond Heiberg, and that we now have a picture of Archimedes for the new millennium, with which historians will engage for the foreseeable future.