Palimpsest

I learned the word palimpsest years ago, as I studied Greek and looked at photos showing papyrus scrolls of ancient biblical texts or writings like those found at Nag Hamadi or the Dead Sea scrolls found near Qumran.  Who knew that I'd ever run across this word in a picture like this?  Palimpsest is a rather esoteric word, used mainly by people who study or work with old manuscripts.  Wikipedia defines it thus:

A palimpsest /ˈpælɪmpsɛst/ is a manuscript page from a scroll or book from which the text has been scraped or washed off and which can be used again.  The word "palimpsest" comes through Latin palimpsēstus from Ancient Greek παλίμψηστος (palímpsestos, “scratched or scraped again”) originally compounded from πάλιν (palin, “again”) and ψάω (psao, “I scrape”) literally meaning “scraped clean and used again.”

Is that definition esoteric enough for you?  Here's an example of a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-used.  (Click to enlarge the image.)  You can clearly see the remains of larger Greek letters.  Someone cleaned it and turned it sideways to write again.  I've seen pictures of war-time letters, where the writer turned the page sideways like this and continued to write — and it was indeed possible to read the words that intersected each other.  That's one way to save paper.

Back to the picture at the top.  Maybe I should consider acquiring a small blackboard and posting a "word of the day" on my patio, to be perused by my neighbors (mostly young adults and college-age couples) as they come and go.  Think they'd kick me out of the apartment complex?

Cross-posted on my word blog.