Historians have identified the ancient manuscript of Claudius Ptolemy

A team of researchers from the Sorbonne in Paris and New York University identified most of the text and revealed its content.

Researchers have identified an ancient manuscript written by Claudius Ptolemy, an Egyptian mathematician and astronomer of Greek descent, in the first century AD. This is reported by Live Science.

Written in Greek, the text was first found on parchment in 1819 in the library of Bobbio Abbey in northern Italy by Angelo Mai, a cardinal and scholar of ancient texts.

Since parchment was considered very expensive in the 6th or 7th century AD, someone wrote another text in the Ptolemy manuscript – the Etymology of the Spanish theologian Isidore of Seville.

In the past, experts tried to erase this text, but in the end the parchment was damaged.

Modern researchers have turned to the method of multispectral imaging. The basic idea is that different wavelengths of light illuminate a page written with different inks in different ways. It was this method that made it possible to read more than half of what was written.

In particular, they discovered a manual that explained how to build a meteoroscope, an instrument used to track distances and study the stars. The scientist advised to create a device with a diameter of at least 0.3 meters.

“Unfortunately, we don’t have the first and last pages, so we don’t have the author’s name. But things begin to appear that are very characteristic of Ptolemy’s Greek dictionary. He has a special style, he uses certain phrases and words that were not used by anyone else in all of ancient Greek literature,” said study co-author Alexander Jones.

It was previously reported that archaeologists at the Sacquara necropolis near Cairo discovered a papyrus scroll containing texts from the Book of the Dead.

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