Simonides making it look like a palimpsest

Steven Avery

Administrator
Donal O'Sullivan

But Simonides had devised a particularly clever way to deceive the experts.
Aware that many manuscripts had been written over an earlier treatise because of
paper shortages, he utilized the appearance of such a palimpsest to his advantage.
Instead of taking an old parchment and scraping off the text, he added text in lighter
ink, to achieve the appearance of an older text underneath the main text.20 When
the chemical flooded over the ink, the brown-yellow color ink turned blue. Professor
Dindorf trusted that the lighter ink would be the older text, faded over the centuries.
Instead, Simonides had fooled him with this clever procedure.
 
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