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Historical transmission, manuscript stemma, and archival provenance for geometor.archimedes.

Three Streams of Textual Transmission

Our knowledge of Archimedes' works descends through three extraordinary historical channels, all represented across the seven units of this codex:

  1. Archetype Codex A (Byzantine Minuscule, 9th c. → Renaissance): Compiled in ninth-century Constantinople in the school of Leo the Mathematician, translated word-for-word into Latin at Viterbo in 1269 by William of Moerbeke (Vatican Ottob. lat. 1850), copied by fifteenth-century Italian humanists before disappearing after 1564, and printed in the 1544 Basel editio princeps (venatorius:1544). Preserves Sphere and Cylinder I–II, Measurement of a Circle, Conoids and Spheroids, On Spirals, Equilibrium of Planes I–II, The Sand-Reckoner, Quadrature of the Parabola, and Eutocius's Greek commentaries.

  2. The Arabic Tradition (*Kitāb al-Maʾkhūdhāt*): Ninth-century Baghdad geometer Thābit ibn Qurra translated the fifteen planar propositions of the Book of Lemmas into Arabic; Abraham Ecchellensis and Giovanni Alfonso Borelli published the Latin translation Liber Assumptorum at Florence in 1661 (ecchellensis-borelli:1661), preserving the Arbelos, Twin Circles, Neusis Trisection, and Salinon.

  3. Codex C — The Archimedes Palimpsest (10th c. → 1906 Discovery): A tenth-century Constantinople parchment scraped and overwritten in the thirteenth century as a Christian Euchologion, examined by Johan Ludvig Heiberg in 1906 (heiberg:1907). Restored the Greek text of On Floating Bodies, uncovered fragments of the 14-piece Stomachion, and recovered the lost masterpiece The Method of Mechanical Theorems Addressed to Eratosthenes, translated into English in T. L. Heath's 1912 Cambridge Supplement (heath:1912).

Public-Domain Archival Provenance

All primary editions used in geometor.archimedes are 100% public-domain works whose metadata records are archived and SHA-256 checksummed in resources/works/sources_manifest.json:

  • Heath (1897): The Works of Archimedes, Cambridge University Press (Internet Archive worksofarchimede00arch).

  • Heath (1912): The Method of Archimedes, Recently Discovered by Heiberg, Cambridge University Press (Internet Archive methodofarchimed00archiala).

  • Heiberg Vol. I (1880): Archimedis Opera Omnia cum commentariis Eutocii, Vol. I, B. G. Teubner, Leipzig (Internet Archive archimedisoperao01arch).

  • Heiberg Vol. II (1881): Archimedis Opera Omnia cum commentariis Eutocii, Vol. II, B. G. Teubner, Leipzig (Internet Archive archimedisoperao02arch).