It contains two works of Archimedes that were thought to have been lost (the "Stomachion" and the "Method of Mechanical Theorems") and the only surviving original Greek edition of his work "On Floating Bodies." The first version of the compilation is believed to have been produced by Isidorus of Miletus, the architect of the geometrically complex Hagia Sophia cathedral in Constantinople, sometime around 530 AD. The copy found in the palimpsest was created from this original, also in Constantinople, during the Macedonian Renaissance (c. 950 AD), a time when mathematics in the capital was being revived by the former Greek Orthodox bishop of Thessaloniki Leo the Geometer, a cousin of the Patriarch.