“After this he issued in rapid succession a series of universal laws and directives, forbidding
sacrifice to idols, consultation of oracles, erection of statues of the gods, initiation into mystery rites,
and the defilement of the cities by the butchery of gladiatorial combats. Another law was handed
down concerning the inhabitants of Egypt and, in particular, of Alexandria, who had the custom of
using eunuchs to serve in the worship of the river that runs through their territory; the law provided
for the elimination of this whole effeminate tribe and ensured that those afflicted with this
abomination would not be seen anywhere. And, while the superstitious pagans assumed that the river
would no longer give them the benefits of its familiar flooding, quite the opposite of what they
expected happened, as God in effect ratified the emperor's law. For those who were polluting their
cities with their vice ceased to exist, while the river, as if to cleanse the land, flooded as never
before, inundating all the fields with its fructifying stream, thereby instructing the ignorant that sinful
men must abandon their ways and all must acknowledge that only the Giver of All Good is
responsible for their prosperity.” (Eusebius, The Life of Constantine 4.25)By the middle of the ninth century, however, iconoclasm fell out of favor with the family of the Byzantine
emperor, and the veneration of the holy icons was restored, an event that is commemorated still in the
Orthodox Church by the annual celebration of the “Triumph of Orthodoxy.” Like other churches throughout
the empire, Hagia Sophia was once again decorated with magnificent depictions of Christ, the Virgin, and
the various saints, but many of these representations were later vandalized or covered over, first by the
Crusaders from the West at the start of the thirteenth century and finally by the Turks, who transformed the
basilica into a mosque, in the middle of the fifteenth century. We noted earlier (p. 181) that the pagan
Parthenon in Athens was similarly converted into a Christian church and then an Islamic mosque. In both
cases these transformations helped to ensure the preservation, although in an altered state, of these
irreplaceable monuments. It was not only buildings that were preserved in this way as the relics of Greek
civilization fell into the hands, first of Christian then of Muslim conquerors. The most spectacular
example of this is a book, the Archimedes Palimpsest, whose sale at auction in 1998 and subsequent
intensive examination have been widely covered in the media. A palimpsest is a text that is reused, by
erasing or covering over an earlier script and then writing a new script over it. In the case of the
Archimedes Palimpsest, the older text was a collection of treatises by the third-century BC mathematical
genius Archimedes of Syracuse, copied and illustrated with diagrams in the tenth century after Christ. The
writing was done on parchment, also known as “vellum,” that is, animal skin treated and prepared for use
as a writing material. (The English word “parchment” is derived from the name of the city of Pergamum,
famous for its library.) In subsequent centuries, interest in the rather abstruse and difficult writings of
Archimedes faded, and the pages of these works were washed and reused around AD 1200 for the writing
of a collection of devotional texts. Fortunately, it is now becoming possible, using multispectral imaging,
to read the text of Archimedes that had been hidden from sight for nearly a thousand years (Figure 86).