Archaeologists have discovered tens of thousands of ice age paintings in an isolated location in the Amazonian rainforest. A full two-hour drive from San José del Guaviare, the paintings date back to over 12,000 years ago and span nearly 12 kilometers across Colombian cliff faces.
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”.
