It takes an expert eye to decipher old and damaged manuscripts, but even that is not enough sometimes. Recently, multispectral technology has aided researchers of the Dead Sea Scrolls to read ink invisible to the naked eye and pinpoint previously unknown texts.
For quite a long time writing materials were a very expensive thing. It is not surprising that Mediaeval scholars were looking for some ways to cut the costs or recycle the materials. That’s how palimpsests were introduced. Often the old not-so-important texts were scraped or washed off from the leather (or papyrus) pages to allow for the new texts to be written over. This time the unimportant text of the medical recipe book attributed to Hippocrates was replaced by a layer of Bible text known as the “Sinaitic manuscript”.
