Editing Palimpsest (section)

== Modern decipherment ==
Faint legible remains were read by eye before 20th-century techniques helped make lost texts readable. To read palimpsests, scholars of the 19th century used chemical means that were sometimes very destructive, using [[tincture]] of [[gall]] or, later, [[ammonium bisulfate]]. Modern methods of reading palimpsests using [[ultraviolet]] light and photography are less damaging.

Innovative [[Digitization|digitized images]] aid scholars in deciphering unreadable palimpsests. Superexposed photographs exposed in various light spectra, a technique called "multispectral filming", can increase the contrast of faded ink on parchment that is too indistinct to be read by eye in normal light. For example, [[multispectral imaging]] undertaken by researchers at the [[Rochester Institute of Technology]] and [[Johns Hopkins University]] recovered much of the undertext (estimated to be more than 80%) from the ''[[Archimedes Palimpsest]]''. At the [[Walters Art Museum]] where the palimpsest is now conserved, the project has focused on experimental techniques to retrieve the remaining text, some of which was obscured by overpainted icons. One of the most successful techniques for reading through the paint proved to be [[X-ray]] [[fluorescence]] imaging, through which the iron in the ink is revealed. A team of imaging scientists and scholars from the United States and Europe is currently using spectral imaging techniques developed for imaging the ''Archimedes Palimpsest'' to study more than one hundred palimpsests in the library of [[Saint Catherine's Monastery]] in the [[Sinai Peninsula]] in [[Egypt]].<ref name="imaging">{{cite web|url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/in-the-sinai-a-global-team-is-revolutionizing-the-preservation-of-ancient-manuscripts/2012/08/30/1c203ef4-ca1f-11e1-aea8-34e2e47d1571_story.html|title=In the Sinai, a global team is revolutionizing the preservation of ancient manuscripts|publisher=Washington POST Magazine|date=September 8, 2012|access-date=2012-09-07|archive-date=2021-05-13|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210513102815/https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/in-the-sinai-a-global-team-is-revolutionizing-the-preservation-of-ancient-manuscripts/2012/08/30/1c203ef4-ca1f-11e1-aea8-34e2e47d1571_story.html|url-status=live}}</ref>