Somewhere in the thirteenth century, a scribe took a book of mathematics, cut the binding, and scraped the pages until the writing was almost gone. Then he turned the sheets sideways, folded them into a smaller book, and copied out prayers over the top. He was not trying to destroy anything. Parchment was expensive, the old text was in his way, and he needed pages. What he did not know was that the book he was scraping clean held the only surviving copy of some of the greatest mathematical reasoning of the ancient world.

The word for what he made is palimpsest from the Greek for “scraped again.” For most of history, books were written on parchment, which was animal skin, and animal skin was costly and slow to make. When a text fell out of use, or out of favor, or simply out of fashion, the practical thing was not to throw the pages away but to wash or scrape off the ink and write something new in its place. The old words did not vanish. They sank. A ghost of the first text stayed in the grain of the skin, under the second, waiting.

The book the scribe scraped that century belonged to Archimedes. In the tenth century, someone in Constantinople had copied his treatises out of older sources, and some of those treatises exist nowhere else on earth. Three hundred years later they were washed away to make a prayer book. The under-text sat unread for six hundred more years until, in 1906, a scholar named Johan Heiberg leaned over that prayer book with a magnifying glass and realized he was looking at Archimedes underneath. A century after that, ultraviolet light, multispectral imaging, and X-rays powerful enough to light up the iron still buried in the original ink recovered pages Heiberg could never fully read — including a work on the mathematics of infinity that no one had known survived at all.

Here is the part that belongs in this series. The monk who scraped Archimedes was not a villain. Most palimpsests were made for reasons as ordinary as a shortage of paper. And yet the effect is exactly the same as deliberate suppression: a culture decides, page by page, what is worth keeping and what can be written over and the things it does not value disappear beneath the things it does. Pagan geometry gave way to prayer. A philosopher’s argument gave way to a saint’s sermon. The choice was rarely a conspiracy. It was something quieter and, in a way, more final: forgetting by reuse.

Archimedes is not alone under there. Cicero’s book on the ideal republic survives largely because it was found beneath a commentary on the Psalms. One of the oldest Greek Bibles in existence was itself scraped and overwritten with sermons; scholars named it Rescriptus, “rewritten,” as if the erasure had become part of its title. For every lost work we have recovered this way, it is fair to assume there are others still sleeping under a second text, or gone entirely because no one thought to look.

This is the thing about erasure. It is almost never a bonfire. It is a hand, a blade, and a decision that the new words matter more than the old ones. And what makes the palimpsest extraordinary is that the decision turned out not to be final after all. The skin remembers. Given the right light, the buried text rises back to the surface, and we get to read what someone tried, for whatever reason, to write over.

I write fiction, but the history underneath it is real, and the palimpsest is almost too perfect a symbol for what The Apocrypha Trilogy is about. My characters spend their time reading what was meant to stay buried: recovering the first text under the second, the truth under the cover story, the thing that was scraped away because someone decided it should not be remembered. Some secrets were buried to protect the world. Others were buried to control it. A palimpsest is both at once: a page that hid something, and a page that, in the end, could not keep it hidden.

The buried texts, the lost libraries, and the codes that reveal them all run through The Apocrypha Trilogy. The first book, The Alexandria Cypher, is available now and the prequel novella is free if you want to start there. The Jerusalem Code releases on August 1, 2026.

For fans of Kate Mosse, Brad Meltzer, and Deborah Harkness, The Apocrypha Trilogy delivers a heart-pounding journey of mystery, history, and suspense.