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Common in the Middle Ages, palimpsests are works written on calf hide vellum pages, where the earlier ink has been scraped off and replaced with new writing. While some underlying text can occasionally be made out with the naked eye, technologies such as infrared bring to light words that were lost centuries ago...Iceland's connections to Scandinavia led to some of the most well-preserved information from the Viking Age, including an overview of Norway's royal lineage through the death of Magnus V Erlingsson in 1184. The islands's ancient poets, known as Skalds, were highly sought after across the Norse world. Norwegian...

Scientists x-rayed ancient Egyptian tomb paintings to better understand the painters' creative process.Every painter has a process, but the painstaking revisions and countless tiny edits are invisible to those who only see the final product. In a study published today in PLOS ONE, researchers used x-rays to reveal how 3000-year-old paintings inside Egypt’s Theban Necropolis unfolded step by step. The findings hint at the creative process used to produce these ancient masterworks.Applying the x-ray method to ancient Egyptian wall paintings “is really a game changer,” says Marine Cotte, a chemist at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, who previously collaborated with...

Although it is the world’s oldest continually operating library, dating back to the 6th century, the collection of manuscripts at St. Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mt. Sinai is no stranger to the latest technology. In 2012, they began spectral imaging on many of the manuscripts to discover the texts beneath the texts. Many of the manuscripts are palimpsests, meaning a previous text had been erased so the scribe could reuse the valuable parchments. Traces of the original texts remained, however. Now the monastery has begun a high-tech process of digitizing its 4,500 manuscripts—a process that could easily take...