{
  "author": "ChronologiaOS editorial guides",
  "date": "2026-10-09",
  "department": "Mathematics & Measurement",
  "department_id": "NUMBERS",
  "epistemic_label": "Source guide",
  "epistemic_status": "SOURCE_GUIDE",
  "period": "287\u2013212 BCE",
  "place": "Syracuse, Sicily",
  "public_sources": [
    {
      "publisher": "Cambridge University Press",
      "title": "The Works of Archimedes",
      "type": "Critical edition and translation",
      "url": "https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/works-of-archimedes/E5F35917BA320E2B40696056CB6ED610"
    }
  ],
  "publication_state": "PUBLIC",
  "read_time": "3 min read",
  "sections": [
    {
      "body": "The Works of Archimedes, in the Cambridge edition, presents the mathematical treatises attributed to Archimedes of Syracuse, who lived from about 287 to 212 BCE. The research record stores that lifespan as the authorial context, not as the date of any individual work.",
      "heading": "Start with the edition",
      "source": 0
    },
    {
      "body": "The record notes that the manuscript history of the corpus is much later than the compositions, and that the famous palimpsest belongs to witness and reception history, not to the original composition date. Each treatise will need its own record.",
      "heading": "Composition and witness"
    },
    {
      "body": "Do not equate an author's lifespan with a text's date, and do not equate a manuscript's date with either. Three dates, three kinds of evidence.",
      "heading": "Try the research habit"
    },
    {
      "body": "When a lost treatise is recovered from a reused parchment, what exactly has been recovered: the author's words, a copyist's version, or a later editor's arrangement?",
      "heading": "A question to carry forward"
    }
  ],
  "short_title": "Which Archimedes are you reading?",
  "slug": "archimedes-what-survives-of-his-works",
  "summary": "The treatises of Archimedes reach us through manuscripts made a thousand years after his death. Learn to keep an author's lifetime, a text's composition, and a copy's date apart.",
  "tags": [
    "Archimedes",
    "Greek mathematics",
    "Manuscripts",
    "Palimpsest"
  ],
  "title": "Archimedes: what survives of his works."
}