Technology Lost to Time VIII.V.V: Archimedes, Sand, & Shapes

Thank God we’ve reached the end with this. Don’t get me wrong, I love Archimedes, but the dude did so much over such a wide range that it makes researching him exceptionally tedious.

In this article, we’re going to keep it short and sweet to cap off the amazing life of this grandiose man, a giant whose shoulders even Leonardo Da Vinci stood upon.

Legacy in Numbers

Talk about a perfect segue. Da Vinci invented the “steam gun” and is noted to have credited Archimedes with the original concept, which is evidentially supported by Plutarch, who, when describing the Siege of Syracuse, mentions a certain “long pipe that threw nuclei at the enemy.”

Archimedes was also one of the first to posit something akin to a hypothesis pertaining to the distance between celestial bodies as well as help establish the groundwork on a heliocentric model of the solar system, though he would have thought of it as the whole universe, as its scale is something even we puny mad gods, with our rockets and sticks, can only paw at conceptually. Speaking of, the concept of a center of gravity was apparently also posited by Archimedes.

Physical Construction of Da Vinci's Steam Gun Concept, Orignated by Archimedes

Death of Archimedes

Gustave Courtois (1853-1923)-'death of Archimedes'-engraving

At the end, Archimedes was said to have been drawing diagrams for mathematical theorems in the sand of the beach when the Roman legionaries found him after a long and grueling siege. According to unconfirmed legends, the final assault ln Syracuse took place under the cover of darkness because the mirrors kept blinding the besieging Romans by daylight.

Despite orders not to kill the aging mathematician, the legionaries that found him, whether hopped up on rage fueled by experiences on the other side of his devastating war machines or simply not recognizing him for who he was, cut him down anyway. His last words to them were simply, “Do not disturb my circles,” before his blood painted the sand red, only to mix with the water at high tide.

His best friend, Heraclides, wrote the only biography of the man, but it didn’t survive to the modern day.

Cicero and his magistrates discovering the forgotten Tomb of Archimedes

Syracuse slowly forgot about its most illustrious citizen, and in 75 BC, Cicero went poking around to find the tomb, saying this:

“But from Dionysius’s own city of Syracuse I will summon up from the dust—where his measuring rod once traced its lines—an obscure little man who lived many years later, Archimedes. When I was questor in Sicily [in 75 BC, 137 years after the death of Archimedes] I managed to track down his grave. The Syracusians knew nothing about it, and indeed denied that any such thing existed. But there it was, completely surrounded and hidden by bushes of brambles and thorns. I remembered having heard of some simple lines of verse which had been inscribed on his tomb, referring to a sphere and cylinder modelled in stone on top of the grave. And so I took a good look round all the numerous tombs that stand beside the Agrigentine Gate. Finally I noted a little column just visible above the scrub: it was surmounted by a sphere and a cylinder. I immediately said to the Syracusans, some of whose leading citizens were with me at the time, that I believed this was the very object I had been looking for. Men were sent in with sickles to clear the site, and when a path to the monument had been opened we walked right up to it. And the verses were still visible, though approximately the second half of each line had been worn away.”

• Translation by Michael Grant in Cicero-On the Good Life, Penguin Books, New York, 1971, Pages 86-87.

While dusting away the brambles and weeds, Cicero took the time to transcribe the words etched into his tombstone, though I was unable to find them either. His tomb was marked by a sphere in a cylinder as a physical demonstration of Archimedes’ personal favorite and greatest mathematical achievement:

“If a sphere is inscribed in a cylinder, then the sphere is 2/3 the cylinder in both surface area and volume.” -Archimedes

Yet another mathematical achievement we owe to the mind of the man that coined the term “Eureka!”

Modernity & The Palimpsest

In modern times, the Hotel Panorama claimed to have found the tomb while digging out their future courtyard in the 1960s, though every Italian source I dug up on the subject called it a scam and accused many Syracusans of profiteering off their most illustrious citizen. One even went so far as to accuse them of being unworthy of their millennia of history, being possessed of both short-term memories, and short-sighted plans.

The Palimpsest is a group of pages containing much of the work of Archimedes written in his native Doric Greek addressed as letters to his contemporaries. It is some of his only surviving work of his seminal writings of On Floating Bodies, Ostomachion, and Method of Mechanical Theorems.

The Palimpsest’s first version is believed to have been composed by Isidorus of Miletus, who was the architect behind the Hagia Sophia during the reign of the famed Emperor Justinian, often called the Last Roman Emperor. The copy in the Palimpsest was transcribed from the original in Constantinople during a period known as the Macedonian Renaissance in 950 CE, which is a time the study of math in the Greco-Byzantine world was witnessing a revival alongside many other great historical works by former Bishop of Thessaloniki,

Excerpt from the Palimpsest; Recovered from a Prayer Book painted over the original work

Leo the Geometer, who was a cousin of the sitting Patriarch of Orthodox Christendom at the time.During and after the Sack of Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade by the Venetians and their goons, the Palimpsest alongside many other great Greek works was carted off to a supposed safe haven at a monastery in Palestine because the Latin Crusaders, afraid of things they couldn’t understand, viewed Greek works as heretical and frequently burned them. Like a bunch of Nazis. After stealing much of the wealth of Constantinople, betraying its parent-state, and ruining the future of both Roman (Byzantine) and Venetian independence long-term, the Palimpsest was stuck in that monastery where a monk, not appreciating the abstract work, plastered over it to write a series of prayers.

If you couldn’t tell, all of this riles me up a bit.

Anyways, some more centuries passed and after a brief scandal involving a businessman attempting to paint over the works in order to increase the value of the book, we were granted the contents of the Palimpsest in its glory.

I gleaned over a lot there, but this could be its own article and I have to keep it moving.

As for the Tomb of Archimedes, no one really knows where its exact location is today, which would make Cicero roll over in his grave. After searching online, this photo is what I found:

Necropolis Grotticelle

This is a necropolis on the outskirts of modern Syracuse, but despite an air of authenticity, looks can be deceiving. This is actually a Roman-era columbarium, which makes it significantly younger than our boy Archimedes and the Punic War. The tomb is forever lost, or it’s somewhere in there. But I highly doubt it. As someone whose ancestors hail from this city, and that has grown to admire the great man through the window of extensive research, I’ll personally think of him as a wacky uncle I wish I could sit down and share a glass of wine with.

If we do find it, I’d like to make a similar pilgrimage to Cicero’s to pay homage to two great men. Archimedes, wherever he is buried, might perhaps prefer the peace. Afterall, we wouldn’t want to disturb his circles.