Monks scraped Archimedes off the page in 1229, a Paris family kept the book in a damp cellar, and a judge let them sell it hours before a church's claim could stop it

A scribe in Constantinople copied works of Archimedes onto parchment in the 10th century. In 1229 the book was unbound, scraped and reused for a prayer book. The text underneath includes the only known copy of The Method. In 1906 the Danish scholar Johan Heiberg found it in a Greek Orthodox library in Istanbul and photographed it. It then disappeared. Between 1923 and 1930 the Paris businessman Marie Louis Sirieix acquired it. How he obtained it was never established. Water and mould damaged it, and after about 1929 a forger painted gold-leaf evangelist portraits on four pages. Sirieix died in 1956 or 1957, and his daughter, Anne Guersan, inherited it. In 1998 she consigned it to Christie's New York. The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem sued, saying it had been stolen from its library. Hours before the October 1998 auction, Judge Kimba Wood ruled that the French family had clear title. Her written opinion applied French law and found the claim barred by laches. Greece's consul general bid up to $1.9 million. An anonymous American bought it for about $2 million and lent it to the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, where imaging recovered much of the hidden text. In March 2026 a CNRS researcher identified page 123, missing since 1906, in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Blois.