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Jamallo Kreen
Master of Realmslore
USA
1537 Posts |
 Posted - 28 Apr 2007 : 19:56:41
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The Archimedes Palimpsest is a real-world ancient document which had its ancient text scraped off and replaced by a Medieval religious text. Modern technology has revealed the ancient texts, and a couple of days ago it was revealed that there is a third ancient text hidden in the document.
In order of discovery, the "lost" texts were: a previously unknown text by Archimedes which suggests that he discovered the calculus two thousand years before Newton and Liebnitz, the only surviving writings
of Hyperides, an Athenian politician from the 4th Century BC, and now a previously unknown commentary on Aristotle by Alexander of Aphrodisias.
I bring this up not just because FR fans are likely to be interested in ancient manuscripts, but because of the opportunities palimpsests (parchments whose text has been scraped off and over-written) may offer to DMs. We've known how to use hidden page and similar spells to hide writings in "normal" texts. (Who hasn't dreamed of planting the recipe for lich potion in some musty old cookbook? Well some of you have, I'm sure.) The problem with using spells to hide writings within plain text is that a simple detect magic will reveal that there is a dweomer on the document. The beauty of palimpsests is that there is no magical dweomer -- the text is scraped off and overwritten by purely non-magical means, although a covered text might be discovered by alchemical or magical means. I would suggest that PCs first learn of this possibility after they sell some old books to a collector, who rumor then credits with possession of some ancient "lost book" (the Talfirian Book of Shadows, for example); eventually the PCs will figure out that they sold the priceless treasure -- probably for a pittance.
Palimpsests make good "McGuffins," too: if it is apparent that a parchment document is a palimpsest, the PCs may go to great lengths to discover the hidden text, only to find out that there was a good reason that the text was overwritten (e.g., it is heretical, or poorly-written, or just plain wrong)!
The BBC news article on the latest discovery in the Archimedes Palimpsest is at;http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/6591221.stm
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I have a mouth, but I am in a library and must not scream.
Feed the poor and stroke your ego, too: http://www.freerice.com/index.php.
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Faraer
Great Reader
3308 Posts |
Posted - 28 Apr 2007 : 23:01:41
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That's wonderful. It puts me in mind of a relic of Deneir called the Manifold Palimpsest, which bears a long -- infinite, some whisper -- succession of writings. D&D and the Realms already have related things such as the secret page spell and the palimpsest paper-monster in City of Splendors.
This is from the Clute/Grant Encyclopedia of Fantasy:quote:
. . . we use the term in a sense analogous to its original meaning, to refer to what one might call a "writing world" -- one which outlives the brief realities inscribed, each after another, upon it . . . Cosmologies -- like the multiverse created by Michael Moorcock and Roger Zelazny's Amber -- which treat huge arrays of mundane and fantasy realities as having been written in sand upon a central and fundamental reality can also be described as treating that substrate as a palimpsest . . . stories in which new realities are written over -- on top of -- prior realities.
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Slightly OT: Archimedes Palimpsest
