A photo from open sources
It turns out that not only under the paint layer of a picture or icon can discover another, older work, specialists Stanford University of the United States for example managed on medieval parchment with christian text Psalms find a much earlier and even much more valuable text.
It turned out that around the 6th century, nobody knew now the scientist has translated and written on this parchment book the ancient Greek surgeon Galen. It was made in a monastery St. Catherine. A thousand years later, the unique translation manuscript was scraped, the benefit of parchment allows you to do this quite easily. On this “blank sheet” Christian texts were later written. Researchers suggest that this was not done for the purpose of destruction of the ancient manuscript, and due to lack of paper.
This parchment has long been suspicious of what it stores in some kind of secret, however, processing the manuscript with ultraviolet and infrared didn’t give anything. And then the experts Stanford University applied an innovative method – X-ray examination of parchment with a particle accelerator, which they spent in the SLAC lab. This allowed the expert to get to the bottom of the Syrian text hidden in parchment. So here the manuscript of an ancient Greek surgeon was restored in a manner.
Presumably, a new method for examining ancient manuscripts on parchments will reveal a lot of interesting things that are hidden under secondary, far less valuable and interesting records …
