Parchment can be recycled by scraping off any ink and writing on the fresh surface. The old text isn’t entirely gone, though. It remains embedded in the page as a ghostly shadow, which can be ...

The reuse of the parchment for the Latin manuscript meant there were faint remains of the previous text. Attempts to reveal the original text were made for the first time in the early 19th century.

but it means you can reuse parchment if you are short of it. "You take books off shelves, you scrub off the text, you cut them up and you make a new book." In 1906 it came to light that one of the ...

A document like this, where one layer of text hides the erased remains of another, is called a palimpsest. The Kessel find is a double palimpsest because the parchment was then used a third time.

About 1,300 years ago a scribe in Palestine took a book of the Gospels inscribed with a Syriac text and erased it. Parchment was scarce in the desert in the Middle Ages, so manuscripts were often ...

The parchment they were studying was from the Codex ... and philosophy will be discovered in the future by studying hidden text in old, reused parchment using multispectral imaging.