The Dictionary.com Word of the Day for Thursday, May 18, 2006 was:

palimpsest \PAL-imp-sest\,

noun: 1. A manuscript, usually of papyrus or parchment, on which more than one text has been written with the earlier writing incompletely erased and still visible.

2. An object or place whose older layers or aspects are apparent beneath its surface.

Palimpsest is from Latin palimpsestus, from Greek palimpsestos, “scraped or rubbed again,” from palin, “again” + psen, “to rub (away).”

The second and figurative use of the word is of particular interest to me as it is the title of my novel and a concept I’ve been exploring for some time, in fact, ever since Panos brought it to my attention when he read Vrasidas Karalis’s text Ο Νίκος Καζαντζάκης Και Το Παλίμψηστο Της Ιστορίας. (Εκδόσεις Κανάκης 1994) or Nikos Kazantzakis and the Palimpsest of History.

The title of the book refers to Kazantzakis’s use of the word “palimpsest” to describe the “face of Greece.” Kazantzakis first used the word in this fashion in a 1937 text of his travels to the Peloponesus first published in the Greek daily Kathimerini and later published in book form and translated into English in 1965 as Travels to the Morea. When Kazantzakis calls the “face of Greece” a “palimpsest” he is refering to layers and layers of history visible everywhere.

The Dictionary.com Word of the Day cites a recent use of the word palimpsest in figurative form:

It’s a mysterious many-layered palimpsest of a metropolis where generations of natives and visitors have left their mark, from Boadicea and the Romans, through the Middle Ages and the Elizabethan era to the present. — Philip French, “Jack the knife”, The Observer, February 10, 2002 

I’ve been collating earlier uses of the word palimpsest.

The OED cites De Quincey in 1845,

What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain?

Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1856,

Let who says ‘The soul’s a clean white white paper’ rather say A palimpsest…defiled

and Lewes in 1879.

History unrolls the palimpsest of mental evolution

I had already come across the 1937 Kazantzakis use:

The face of Greece is a palimpsest of twelve major overlapping scripts: the modern, 1921, the Turkish Occupation, the Frankish occupation, Byzantium, the Roman Empire, the Hellenistic age, the Classical age, the Doric middle ages, the Mycenaean, the Aegean and the Stone Age.

Then there’s George Orwell in 1949:

All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary

In 1994 Jeanette Winterson uses the word in Written on the Body:

Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like Braille.

In 1995, Gore Vidal used the word Palimpsest as the title of his memoirs.

In 1998 Gerard Genette used it in his text Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree to explore the how modern literary texts refer back the previous texts.

But prior to Genette, Karalis informs, Ζήσιμο Λορεντζάτο had already written Το Παλίμπψηστο του Ομήρου or Homer’s Palimpsest.