This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Palimpsests gathers three manuscripts whose original text was scraped from the parchment so the surface could carry a second, later work, a standard medieval economy that here erased material of unusual importance.
The Sana'a Palimpsest is the only known Quranic manuscript whose lower, scraped text does not derive from the standard Uthmanic recension: a different ordering of surahs and numerous variant readings, recovered from beneath an ordinary upper-text Quran by ultraviolet and X-ray imaging beginning in the 1980s. Radiocarbon dating of one folio places the parchment before 669 CE, from a cache found in the roof of the Great Mosque of Sana'a in 1972.
The Archimedes Palimpsest survives today as a thirteenth-century Byzantine prayer book, its pages recycled from several older manuscripts including a tenth-century copy of seven treatises by the mathematician Archimedes. A monk scraped away the Greek mathematics and refolded the leaves to prayer-book size, erasing the only surviving copy of two of the treatises, later recovered by modern imaging; the atlas catalogues the object as the prayer book it survives as, since that is what a reader actually encounters.
Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus is a fifth-century Greek Bible ranked alongside Sinaiticus, Vaticanus and Alexandrinus among the most important New Testament witnesses, overwritten in the twelfth century with a Greek translation of the Syriac deacon Ephrem's works, which gives the manuscript its name, written again. Of its two hundred and eight surviving leaves, the New Testament portion touches every book except Second Thessalonians and Second John.