It all started off as a joke, a French researcher told AFP. But what the team found was a piece of history -- a long-lost page from a legendary manuscript by ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes which had been languishing, forgotten, in the archives of a French museum.

Archimedes, considered one of history’s greatest mathematicians and inventors, lived in the third century BC in the city of Syracuse. Among his many discoveries was the principle of buoyancy, which he struck while stepping out of a bath -- famously prompting him to shout “Eureka!”.

This treatise and many others of his lasted down through the centuries on a manuscript called a palimpsest, which changed hands many times.

Victor Gysembergh, the researcher at France’s CNRS research centre who found the missing page of Archimedes’s palimpsest, told AFP it was a “treasure trove of lost texts from antiquity”.

As well as Archimedes’s mathematical breakthroughs, the manuscript contains his “philosophical, literary and religious” writings, Gysembergh enthused.

The palimpsest itself was not written by Archimedes’s hand but was instead copied during the 900s AD. Around two centuries later, the text was erased and re-used as a Christian prayer book.