palimpsest

新渡戸稲造の武士道を読んでいます。IS BUSHIDO STILL ALIVE? の章から引用します。

One cause of the failure of mission work is that most of the missionaries are entirely ignorant of our history--"What do we care for heathen records?" some say--and consequently estrange their religion from the habits of thought we and our forefathers have been accustomed to for centuries past. Mocking a nation's history?--as though the career of any people even of the lowest African savages possessing no record--were not a page in the general history of mankind, written by the hand of God Himself. The very lost races are a palimpsest to be deciphered by a seeing eye. To a philosophic and pious mind the races themselves are marks of Divine chirography clearly traced in black and white as on their skin; and if this simile holds good, the yellow race forms a precious page inscribed in hieroglyphics of gold!

"palimpsest" を調べます。

・Oxford English Dictionary: an ancient document from which some or all of the original text has been removed and replaced by a new text: a study of the novel as a palimpsest with one textual layer over another
・Collins Dictionary: a manuscript on which two or more successive texts have been written, each one being erased to make room for the next: Yet another method involved the palimpsest, a manuscript which recycled an older manuscript.

新渡戸稲造は難しい言葉を良く知っていますね。