Palimpset

“Highclere is an excellent example of a landscape palimpsest.”

I can immediately hear Geordie telling me off for using a nerdy word but the point is that words can be fun and I like words. The fact that most people don’t understand what I am talking about is neither here nor there.

I am however a mere novice compared to Susie Dent, bestselling author, word expert and broadcaster, who always has the most excellent selection of words. At the moment for example, one of her favourite words ‘swullocking’ may be very useful to describing stifling and hot weather.

Palimpsest has Greek origins: the syllables are constructed from “palin” “again or back” and psēn "to rub smooth." The meaning being that Highclere’s landscape has been smoothed and shaped over millennia. In a way, is a re-editing process in which the original shape and purpose was changed. A palimpsest highlights the concept of layering, where older elements are still present buried beneath newer ones, thus creating a complex and rich history. In Highclere’s case this means bronze age burial mounds, Anglo-Saxon tracks and terraces, medieval field patterns and deer parks and Georgian avenues and pleasure gardens.

In fact, Palimpsest is more often used to describe a manuscript or scroll that someone has written something on and which, later, someone else has later scraped off and then written on again. On one side you could say that it is therefore very environmentally friendly and a way of recycling but, on the other hand, it also means that lots of historic words, thoughts and descriptions were lost in order to save paper.

There are many famous examples. A papyrus scroll fragment written by Seneca “On the Maintenance of Friendship” was overwritten by a late-6th-century Old Testament scribe. Then there is the extraordinary Archimedes Palimpsest.

Archimedes lived in the 3rd century BC and is considered one of the leading scientists in classical antiquity and one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. He wrote his proofs as letters in Doric Greek which were later compiled into a comprehensive text sometime around AD530 by Isidorus of Miletus, the architect of the Hagia Sophia, the patriarchal church in Constantinople. A copy of this was made around AD 950 and the study of Archimedes flourished at this time.

The manuscript then travelled to Jerusalem where, in 1229, the Archimedes codex was unbound, scraped and washed, the leaves folded in half, rebound and reused for a Christian liturgical text.

By 1840, the palimpsest was brought back by the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem to its library in the Holy Sepulchre in Constantinople. In 1899, a catalogue of the library's manuscripts was produced and included a transcription of several lines of the partially visible underlying text in this manuscript. John Heiburg, the world's authority on Archimedes, recognised the text and realized that the work was by Archimedes.In 1906 he travelled to Constantinople to study it and confirmed that the palimpsest included works by Archimedes thought to have been lost. This book contained seven treatises in Greek, including the unique source for The Method, The Stomachion, and On Floating Bodies which were not otherwise known by mathematicians, physicists or historians.

Lost during the civil unrest in the 1920’s, the document was then put up for sale and was the subject of various legal claims before being bought by an American and given to The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, for conservation, imaging, and scholarly study. Through modern technology and imaging, layers of texts have been recovered.

These ghost words are a treasure.

Highclere is a palimpsest in many aspects. It an accumulation of past details whether in the building or landscape and who knows maybe we might even find a palimpsest in the Library.