PALIMPSEST (Gr. palinzpsestos, a second time"), the name given to parch ment, papyrus, or other writing material, from which, after it had been written upon, the first writing was wholly or in part removed for the purpose of the page being written upon a second time. When the MS. had been written with one species of ink employed by the ancients, which was merely a fatty pigment, composed chiefly of lampblack, and only coloring the surface, but not producing a chemical change, there was little difficulty in obliterating the writing. It was accomplished by the use of a sponge, and if neces sary, of a scraper and polishing tool ; and, where proper pains were taken, the erasure of the first writ,ing was complete. But when the ink was mineral, its effect reached beyond the surface. In that case a scraping-tool or pumice-stone was indispensable; if these were hastily or insufficiently applied, the erasure was necessarily imperfect; and thus It often happens in ancient MSS. that, from the want of proper care on the part of the copyist in preparing the parchment for re-writing, the original writing may still be read without the slightest difficulty.
The practice of re-preparing used parchment for second use existed among the Romans. The material thus re-prepared was of course reserved for the meaner uses. We meet frequent allusions in the classical writers, as Plutarch, Cicero (Ad Familiares, vii. 18), Catullus (xxii. 115), and others, to the palimpsest, in the sense of a blotter or first draft-book, on which the rough outline or first copy of a document was written, prepa ratory to the accurate transcript which was intended for actual use; and it appears equally certain that in many cases whole books were written upon re-prepared parch ment or papyrus, not only among the Greeks and Romans, but also among the ancient Egyptians.
Of palimpsests of the classic period, however, it is hardly necessary to say no speci men has ever been discovered. It is to the necessities of the mediaeval period that liter ature owes the unquestionably important advantages which have arisen from the revival of the ancient practice of re-preparing already used material for writing. Under the early emperors, the intercourse with Egypt and the east secured a tolerably cheap and abundant supply of papyrus (q.v.), which rendered it unnecessary to recur to the expedi
ent of the palimpsest; and this became still more the case in the 5th and 6th centuries, when the tax on papyrus was abolished. But after the separation of the e. and w., and still more after the Mohammedan conquest of Egypt, the supply of papyrus almost com pletely ceased ; and from the 7th c. in the west, and the 10th or 11th in the east, the pal impsest is found in comparatively frequent use; and its frequency in the 15th c. may be estimated from the fact that some of the earliest books were printed on palimpsest. Some writers have ascribed the prevalence of its use to the indifference, and even to the hos tility of the monks and clergy to classical literature, and have attributed to their reckless destruction of classic MSS., in order to provide material for their own service-books and lep:endaries, the deficiencies in the remains of ancient learning which scholars have now to deplore. That some part of the loss may have so arisen it is impossible to doubt, although it is equally certain that we owe to the mediaeval monks and clergy whatever of ancient literature has been preserved to our day. But the condition in which the exist ing palimpsests are uniformly found—for the most part mere fragments of the ancient writers whose works they originally contained—goes far in itself to show that the MSS. which were broken up by the medireval copyists, for the purpose of being re-written, were almost always already imperfect, or otherwise damaged; nor is there anything in the condition of any single palimpsest which has reached our day to justify the belief, that when it was taken up for the purpose of rescription, the original work which it con tained was in a state at all approaching to completeness. Fortunately, however, there arc many of the relics of ancient learning of which even the mutilated members have an independent value; and this is especially true of biblical MSS., particularly under the critical aspect, and in a still broader sense of all the remains of the ancient historians.