Herculaneum Archaeology | Early European History And Religion

Home | Category: Themes, Archaeology and Prehistory

ARCHAEOLOGY AT HERCULANEUM

Herculaneum

Herculaneum (15 minutes from Pompeii by train) was also destroyed by Vesuvius but was entombed deeper under a different, harder, material than Pompeii because it was closer to Vesuvius. It was buried under 20 meters feet of pyroclastic flows and very hot mud unlike Pompeii, which was buried under ash. The hardened material over Herculaneum is harder to dig but better at preserving stuff that the ash that entombed Pompeii. Perishable things wooden beds, fishnets, rope ladders, sacks of grain and a library of papyrus scrolls have preserved.

Herculaneum never knew what hit it. For a long time archeologist thought many of its residents escaped because less skeletons and entombed bodies were found here than in Pompeii. But it turns the opposite was true. Herculaneum was engulfed by a pyroclastic flow that swept down from Vesuvius before the major eruption even began. This avalanche of fiery gases and volcanic debris incinerated the bodies but left the buildings standing, sort of like what a neutron bomb is supposes to do. Successive flows covered the city with layers of material almost 70 feet thick.

Considerably smaller than Pompeii, Herculaneum was a wealthy seaside town with a population of 5,000 where fisherman and craftsmen mingled with rich nobleman and senators who came down from Rome and used the town as a retreat. The wealthy lived by the sea. Less prominent citizens lived away from the beach in smaller houses and craftsman and merchants slept above their shops on the main street,

Over the the decades archaeologists have unearthed entire pieces of furniture like wooden beds and marble basins as well as foodstuffs such as eggs, vegetables and chicken bones. Many of these items were badly charred but others, including a cloth press that operates the same as printing presses that came 14 centuries later, are in surprisingly good shape. Some of the rectangular houses with red tile roofs that you see don't look all that different from some of the houses in the modern town surrounds the archeological site.

Websites on Ancient Rome: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Rome sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Late Antiquity sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Forum Romanum forumromanum.org ; “Outlines of Roman History” forumromanum.org; “The Private Life of the Romans” forumromanum.org|; BBC Ancient Rome bbc.co.uk/history; Perseus Project - Tufts University; perseus.tufts.edu ; Lacus Curtius penelope.uchicago.edu; Gutenberg.org gutenberg.org The Roman Empire in the 1st Century pbs.org/empires/romans; The Internet Classics Archive classics.mit.edu ; Bryn Mawr Classical Review bmcr.brynmawr.edu; De Imperatoribus Romanis: An Online Encyclopedia of Roman Emperors roman-emperors.org; British Museum ancientgreece.co.uk; Oxford Classical Art Research Center: The Beazley Archive beazley.ox.ac.uk ; Metropolitan Museum of Art metmuseum.org/about-the-met/curatorial-departments/greek-and-roman-art; The Internet Classics Archive kchanson.com ; Cambridge Classics External Gateway to Humanities Resources web.archive.org/web; Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy iep.utm.edu; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy plato.stanford.edu; Ancient Rome resources for students from the Courtenay Middle School Library web.archive.org ; History of ancient Rome OpenCourseWare from the University of Notre Dame /web.archive.org ; United Nations of Roma Victrix (UNRV) History unrv.com

Effect of the Eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79 on Herculaneum

John Seabrook wrote in The New Yorker: “Herculaneum was situated on the southwestern flank of Vesuvius, closer to the volcano than Pompeii, to the southeast, and it was destroyed in a different way. Pompeii was slowly buried under falling pumice and ash, carried by the prevailing wind for several days, while Herculaneum was flash-seared by volcanic phenomena called pyroclastic flows and surges—successive waves of superheated gas and rock that overtook the city rapidly, eventually sealing everything under a deep layer. In a famous letter to Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, who witnessed the eruption from across the bay, at Misenum (his uncle, the naturalist and philosopher Pliny the Elder, died in the catastrophe), described seeing “a horrifying dark cloud, ripped by sudden bursts of fire, writhing back and forth.” [Source: John Seabrook, The New Yorker , November 16, 2015 \=/]

“For centuries, it was believed that most of the residents of Herculaneum had escaped. It was not until 1980 that a grisly discovery was made: gathered together by the harbor, in what had been boat sheds, were some three hundred skeletons, of people who had apparently been waiting for rescue. The pyroclastic flow carbonized organic matter such as wood, food, sewer contents, and scrolls; little trace of these things was found at Pompeii, where almost everything organic eventually decayed. Joseph Jay Deiss, in his evocative book “Herculaneum: Italy’s Buried Treasure,” describes an urban tableau that is frozen in time: “Luncheon still waits on tables. . . . The sick boy in the shop of the gem-cutter lies in his bed, his lunch of chicken uneaten. The baby remains in the cradle, a pathetic little heap of carbonized bones.” \=/

Most of the dead at Herculaneaum perished instantaneously when a pyroclastic flow surged through the city. The vast majority of Herculaneum's roughly 5,000 inhabitants probably escaped before that happened as only a few dozen people have been found in the city itself.

Describing what happened to them, Doug Stewart wrote in Smithsonian magazine, “Shortly after noon on August 24, the sky over Herculaneum darkened ominously, The wind, however, pushed Vesuvius ash well to the southeast...Not long after midnight, a glowing cloud of superheated gas, ash and debris roared down the mountain's western flank towards the sea...Large numbers of Herculaneum's residents had fled towards the sea in hopes of escaping by boat."

Geologist Phil Janney told Smithsonian magazine: “Pyroclastic surges move quite rapidly , between 50 and 100 miles per hour, You can't outrun then. You don't even get much warning." A large number of people appeared to have been trapped in boats, where they were burned alive by a pyroclastic surge that was so hot it melted coins into solid blocks of bronze and silver."

Death at Herculaneum from Eruption of Vesuvius

Few human remains had been found in Herculaneum. In the 1980s archaeologists discovered the remains of nearly 300 dead, including 150 bodies that were discovered in 1982 in a group of warehouses near the seafront, where they apparently had fled. Some of the skulls have clenched teeth, others have their mouths wide open, testimony that they died a sudden, painful death. The find was also valuable archaeologically. Since the Romans cremated their dead there are very few Roman skeletons.

One chamber contained the remains of 12 people huddled together, a few of them embracing each other. Cradled in the arms of one adult was an infant. The head of another was buried facedown, as if sobbing, into a pillow. In a nearby chamber are the tangled remains of 40 individuals, and one horse, that looked to be in panic and chaos when their final moments arrived. An in yet another chamber the bodies where organized into neat rows as if they were rowing a huge ghost ship.

Herculaneaum victims

The remains of a pregnant woman were found along with a tiny skeleton of her seventh-month fetus. Another woman later called the Ring Lady was found with two large jeweled rings and two exquisite gold bracelets shaped like serpents with heads at each end. A third woman, with buck teeth, was judged to be a prostitute by the structure of her pelvic bones. The analysis a 45 year old man showed him to be undernourished, overworked and in continual pain as a result of his rotting teeth and fused discs in his spine.

In 2001, Petrone and Mastrolorenzo published a paper in the journal Nature providing evidence that hundreds of fugitives who gathered in 12 seafront fornci , or boathouses, facing the beach of Herculaneum died instantly from a pyroclastic surge that reached temperatures of 932 degrees F, vaporizing clothing and flesh within seconds. The victims were huddled together in groups of 5,10 and 12. From the position of the bones the scientists determined they died instantly. Small black and blue marks left on skulls were caused when brain tissue boiled and exploded and splattered on the skulls. Moisture from vaporized flesh and blood combined to create a protective, plasterlike material that preserved bones. Much of Herculaneum still lies under 20 meters of hard rock and it is difficult to determine the exact number of dead there.

Discovery of Herculaneum and Early Archaeology There

The first part of Herculaneum discovered was the ancient 2,500-seat theater found by a well digger in 1709. John Seabrook wrote in The New Yorker: “Buried four times deeper than Pompeii, Herculaneum was forgotten. Its name disappeared from history. In 1709, more than sixteen centuries after the eruption, workmen digging a well in the town of Resina hit the upper tier of Herculaneum’s ancient theatre, a structure that once seated twenty-five hundred. The excavations that followed, which were closer to treasure hunts than to archeological digs, were mostly carried out under the auspices of the royal House of Bourbon, members of which ruled France and much of southern Europe, including Spain and parts of present-day Italy. [Source: John Seabrook, The New Yorker , November 16, 2015 \=/]

In 1738, Maria Amalia Christine, a nobleman’s daughter from Saxony, wed Charles of Bourbon, the King of Naples, and became entranced by classical sculptures displayed in the garden of the royal palace in Naples. A French prince digging in the vicinity of his villa on Mount Vesuvius had discovered the antiquities nearly 30 years earlier, but had never conducted a systematic excavation. So Charles dispatched teams of laborers and engineers equipped with tools and blasting powder to the site of the original dig to hunt more treasures for his queen. For months, they tunneled through 60 feet of rock-hard lava, unearthing painted columns, sculptures of Roman figures draped in togas, the bronze torso of a horse—and a flight of stairs. Not far from the staircase they came to an inscription, “Theatrum Herculanense.” They had uncovered a Roman-era town, Herculaneum. [Source: Joshua Hammer, Smithsonian Magazine, July 2015 ~|~]

“Herculaneum remained accessible only by tunnels through the lava until 1927, when teams supervised by Amedeo Maiuri, one of Italy’s pre-eminent archaeologists, managed to expose about a third of the buried city, around 15 acres, and restore as faithfully as possible the original Roman constructions. The major excavations ended in 1958, a few years before Maiuri’s retirement in 1961.” ~|~

Buildings in Herculaneum

Villa of the Papyri (500 meters west of Herculaneum) is a large mansion thought to have been owned by Lucius Calpurnius Piso, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar. Named for its immense library of scrolls, it contained a swimming pool more than 200 feet long and frescoes, mosaics and more than 90 statues. It was known as one of the grandest homes in the world. A blueprint of the building, drawn in the 18th century by a Swiss engineer, was used as a model for the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California.

Herculaneum today

The main floor is almost four meters below sea level. A poor excavation in the 1990s left, it flooded and overgrown with weeds. Now its is better shape. Pumps pump out the water. Some mosaics are visible. Among the items recovered have been damaged, but still legible, papyrus manuscripts, a fine marble statue of Hera, queen of the gods and a finely chiseled head of an Amazon warrior. Most of the villa's wonderful artifacts are displayed in the Naples Archeological Museum. Parts of the Villa de Papyri are open. But don't expect a grand mansion. Just a few rooms are open.

The House of Stags (Herculaneum) boasts a pair of marble hunting statues featuring hunting dogs attacking a male deer in the courtyard. You can also see a the statue of a Satyr and a Wineskin and a statue of a drunken Hercules attempting to pee. The Suburban Baths (Herculaneum) is where The noblemen relaxed in indoor pools under skylights and wall paintings. The vaulted swimming pool and warm and hot baths are in excellent condition. The House of Mosaic of Neptune and Anfitrite (Herculaneum) features an extraordinary mosaic. The house was owned by a rich shop owner.

Samnise House (Herculaneum) has a mock colonnade made of stucco. The Atrium of Mosaics may be the most beautiful and well preserved structure at Herculaneum. It has a black white checkered mosaic floor and a balcony offering a beautiful view of the sea.Decumanus Maximus is Herculaneum's main street. Off the street is a large basilica where citizens to conducted business or sought justice.

The Sacred Area (below the main excavation at Herculaneum) is where ceremonies honoring their pagan Gods were held. Palaestra (in the Sacred Area) is where nobleman watched young athletes compete in wrestling, swimming and foot races. The Theater (outside Herculaneum) had 2,500 seats. Unfortunately not long afterwards it was discovered its multicolored marble facings were looted by Naples nobility. The most startling feature inside the theater today is the ghostly imprint of a face that appears on the ceiling of a tunnel. The image was made by a statue toppled into a soft volcanic flow. Unfortunately it is rarely open.

Herculaneum Reborn

Joshua Hammer wrote in Smithsonian Magazine: “Pompeii’s troubles have come to light at the very moment that its twin city in first-century tragedy—Herculaneum—is being celebrated for an amazing turnaround. As recently as 2002, archaeologists meeting in Rome said Herculaneum was the “worst example of archaeological conservation in a non-war torn country.” But since then, a private-public partnership, the Herculaneum Conservation Project, established by the American philanthropist David W. Packard, has taken charge of the ancient Roman resort town by the Bay of Naples and restored a semblance of its former grandeur. In 2012, Unesco’s director general praised Herculaneum as a model “whose best practices surely can be replicated in other similar vast archaeological areas across the world” (not to mention down the road at Pompeii). [Source: Joshua Hammer, Smithsonian Magazine, July 2015 ~|~]

“I’m standing on a platform suspended above Herculaneum’s ancient beachfront, staring down at a grisly scene. Inside stone archways that framed the entrance to a series of boat houses, 300 skeletons huddle, frozen for eternity in positions they had assumed at the moment of their deaths. Some sit propped against stones, others lie flat on their backs. Children nestle between adults; a few loners sit by themselves. “They didn’t know what was going to happen to them. Maybe they were all waiting for rescue,” says Giuseppe Farella, a conservator. Instead, they were overcome by a 1,000-degree Fahrenheit avalanche of gas, mud and lava, which burned the flesh off their bones, then buried them. “It must have been very painful, but very fast,” says Farella.~|~

Herculaneum plan

Sponsorship of Herculaneum Restoration

Joshua Hammer wrote in Smithsonian Magazine: “The exhibit, which opened in 2013, is among the latest initiatives of the Herculaneum Conservation Project, supported by the Packard Humanities Institute in Los Altos, California (founded by David W. Packard, an heir to the Hewlett-Packard fortune), in partnership with the British School at Rome, and the Superintendency for the Archaeological Heritage of Naples and Pompeii, the government body that administers the site. Since the project’s founding in 2001, it has spent €25 million ($28.5 million) on initiatives that have revitalized these once-collapsing ruins. [Source: Joshua Hammer, Smithsonian Magazine, July 2015 ~|~]

“The project began to take shape one evening in 2000, when Packard (who declined to be interviewed for this article) considered ideas for a new philanthropic endeavor with his friend and renowned classics scholar Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, then director of the British School at Rome. Hadrill recommended Herculaneum. “The superintendent showed [Packard] around the site; two-thirds was closed to the public because it was falling down,” Sarah Court, the project’s press director, tells me in a trailer beside the ruins. “Mosaics were crumbling, frescoes were falling off walls. Roofs were collapsing. It was a disaster.”~|~

“Herculaneum, of course, faced cronyism and financial shortages that Pompeii has today. But Packard staffers took advantage of private money to hire new specialists. One of the site’s biggest problems, lead architect Paola Pesaresi tells me as we walked the grounds, was water. The ancient city sits some 60 feet below the modern city of Herculaneum, and rain and groundwater tends to collect in pools, weakening foundations and destroying mosaics and frescoes. “We had to find a delicate way to prevent all this water from coming in,” she says. The project hired engineers to resurrect the Roman-era sewage system—tunnels burrowed three to six feet beneath the ancient city—two-thirds of which had already been exposed by Maiuri. They also installed temporary networks of aboveground and underground drainpipes. Pesaresi ushers me through a tunnel chiseled through the lava at the entrance to the ruins. Our conversation is nearly drowned out by a torrent of water being pumped from beneath Herculaneum into the Bay of Naples.~|~

Restored Stuff at Herculaneum

Joshua Hammer wrote in Smithsonian Magazine:“We stroll down the Decumanus Maximus, a street where public access has long been quite limited, because of the danger of falling stones and collapsing roofs. After millions of dollars of work, the facades are secure and the houses are dry; the street fully opened in 2011. Workers have painstakingly restored several two-story stone houses, piecing together original lintels of carbonized wood—sealed for 2,000 years in their oxygen-less tomb—along with terra-cotta-and-wood roofs, richly frescoed walls, mosaic floors, beamed ceilings and soaring atriums. [Source: Joshua Hammer, Smithsonian Magazine, July 2015 ~|~]

“Pesaresi leads me into the Casa del Bel Cortile, a recently renovated, two-story home with an open skylight, a mosaic-tiled floor and a restored roof protecting delicate murals of winged deities posed against fluted columns. Unlike Pompeii, this villa, as well as numerous others in Herculaneum, conveys a sense of completeness.~|~

“Art restorers are stripping away layers of paraffin that restorers applied between the 1930s and 1970s to prevent paint from cracking on the city’s magnificent interior frescoes. “The early restorers saw that the figurative scenes were flaking, and they asked themselves, ‘What can we do?’” Emily MacDonald-Korth, then of the Getty Conservation Institute, tells me during a lunch break inside a two-story villa on the Decumanus Maximus. The wax initially worked as a kind of glue, holding the images together, but ultimately speeded the frescoes’ disintegration. “The wax bonded with the paint, and when water trapped behind the walls sought a way of coming out, it pushed the paint off the walls,” she explains. For some years, the Getty Institute has experimented with laser techniques to restore frescoes, employing a noninvasive approach that strips away wax but leaves paint untouched. Now the Getty team has applied that technique at Herculaneum. “We’re doing this in a controlled way. It won’t burn a hole through the wall,” MacDonald-Korth says.~|~

Herculaneum fresco

“In 1982, the site’s then director, Giuseppe Maggi, uncovered the volcanic sands of buried Herculaneum’s ancient seafront, as well as a 30-foot-long wooden boat, hurled ashore during the eruption by a seismic tremor-created tsunami. It was Maggi who uncovered the 300 victims of Vesuvius, along with their belongings, including amulets, torches and money. One skeleton, nicknamed “the Ring Lady,” was bedecked in gold bracelets and earrings; her rings were still on her fingers. A soldier wore a belt and a sword in its sheath, and carried a bag filled with chisels, hammers and two gold coins. Several victims were found carrying house keys, as if fully expecting to return home once the volcanic eruption had passed. Though excavation work began in the 1980s, forensics experts more recently photographed the skeletons, made fiberglass duplicates in a lab in Turin and, in 2011, placed them in the identical positions as the original remains. Walkways allow the public to view the reproduced skeletons.~|~

“Today, with restoration virtually completed and new landscaping installed, tourists can walk along the sand just as residents of Herculaneum would have done. They can also relive to a remarkable degree the experience of Roman visitors who arrived by sea. “If you were here 2,000 years ago, you would approach by boat and pull up on a beach,” says conservator Farella, leading me along a ramp past the arches opening to the skeletons. In front of us, a steep set of stairs breaches the outer walls of Herculaneum and takes us into the heart of the Roman city. Farella leads me past a bath complex and gymnasium—“to smarten yourself up before you come into town”—and a sacred area where departing travelers sought protection before venturing back to sea. Farther along stands the Villa of the Papyri, believed to be the home of Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. (The villa housed the scrolls now being deciphered by researchers.) It is closed to the public, but plans are underway for a renovation, a project that Farella says “is the next great challenge” at Herculaneum.~|~

“He leads me into the Suburban Baths, a series of interconnected chambers filled with huge marble tubs, carved stone benches, tiled floors, frescoes and friezes of Roman soldiers, and a furnace and pipe system that heated the water. Solidified lava, frozen for 2,000 years, pushes up against the doors and windows of the complex. “The bath building was filled with pyroclastic material; excavators chipped it all away,” the conservator says. We pass through the colonnaded entryway of a steam room, down steps leading into a perfectly preserved bathtub. Thick marble walls have sealed in moisture, replicating the atmosphere that Roman bathers experienced. Yet, as if to underscore the reality that even Herculaneum has its troubles, I’m told that parts of this ghostly former center of Roman social life have opened to the public only intermittently, and it is closed now: There’s simply not enough staff to guard it.~|~

Villa dei Papiri

Villa dei Papiri reborn as the Getty Museum in Los Angeles

Villa of the Papyri (500 meters west of Herculaneum) is a large mansion thought to have been owned by Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar and a wealthy statesman who was a consul of the Roman Republic in 58 B.C. Named for its immense library of scrolls, it contained a swimming pool more than 200 feet long and frescoes, mosaics and more than 90 statues. It was known as one of the grandest homes in the world. The Villa dei Papiri was discovered in 1750. Its excavation was supervised by a Swiss architect and engineer named Karl Weber, who dug a network of tunnels through the subterranean structure and eventually created a sort of blueprint of the villa’s layout, which was used as a model for the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California.

John Seabrook wrote in The New Yorker: “The huge house, at least three stories tall, sat beside the Bay of Naples, which at that time reached five hundred feet farther inland than it does today. The villa’s central feature was a long peristyle—a colonnaded walkway that surrounded the pool and gardens and sitting areas, with views of the islands of Ischia and Capri, where the Emperor Tiberius had his pleasure palace. The Getty Villa, in Los Angeles, which was built by J. Paul Getty to house his classical-art collection, and opened to the public in 1974, was modelled on the villa and offers visitors the opportunity to stroll along the peristyle themselves, as it was on that day in 79. [Source: John Seabrook, The New Yorker , November 16, 2015 \=/]

“More than three-quarters of the Villa dei Papiri has never been excavated at all. It wasn’t until the nineteen-nineties that archeologists realized that there are two lower floors—a vast potential warehouse of artistic treasures, awaiting discovery. A dream held by papyrologists and amateur Herculaneum enthusiasts alike is that the Bourbon tunnellers did not find the main library, that they found only an antechamber containing Philodemus’ works. The mother lode of missing masterpieces may still be there somewhere, tantalizingly close. \=/

“On my visit to the Villa dei Papiri. Giuseppe Farella, who works for the Soprintendenza, the regional archeological agency, which oversees the site, took us inside the locked gates and led us into some of the old tunnels made by the Bourbon cavamonti in the seventeen-fifties. We used the lights on our phones to guide us through a smooth, low passageway. An occasional face emerged from the faint wall frescoes. Then we came to the end. “Just beyond is the library,” Farella assured us, the room where Philodemus’ books were found. Presumably, the main library, if one exists, would be near that, within easy reach. \=/

“But for the foreseeable future there will be no more excavations of the villa or the town. Politically, the age of excavation ended in the nineties. Leslie Rainer, a wall-painting conservator and a senior project specialist with the Getty Conservation Institute, who met me in the Casa del Bicentenario, one of the best-preserved structures in Herculaneum, said, “I am not sure excavations will ever be opened again. Not in our lifetime.” She pointed to the paintings on the walls, which the G.C.I.’s team is in the process of recording digitally. The colors, originally vibrant yellows, had turned red as a result of the heat from the volcano’s eruption. Since being uncovered, the painted architectural details have been deteriorating—the paint is flaking and powdering from exposure to the fluctuating temperature and humidity. Rainer’s project analyzes how this happens. \=/

Villa dei Papyri plan

“Richard Janko, of the University of Michigan, argues that books are a special case, archeologically, and should be excavated regardless. “Books are a different kind of artifact,” he said. “You can gain knowledge of a whole way of life through a single book. They are designed to carry information across the centuries.” If we wait until the volcano erupts again, he warns, they could be lost forever. Vesuvius, which has erupted scores of times since A.D. 79 and is still one of the most dangerous volcanoes on earth, has been quiet since 1944.” \=/

Herculaneum Scrolls

In the 1750s excavators recovered 1,500 papyri from the Villa dei Papiri. Today these are are generally referred to as the Herculaneum Scroll. Attempts to unroll them did more harm than good. In some case they were cut and split open, resulting in thousand of poorly labeled fragments, which got further messed up when they were moved to the Museum of Naples. Since then the fragments have been joined together using syntax matches between pages and numbers jotted by 19th century copyists on the fragments and figuring out the number system devised by the 18th century scholars who tore the documents apart.

It is believed that the Herculaneum Scrolls from Villa dei Papiri contain a treasure trove of Classic texts, perhaps holding works by famous historians and writers that are thought to be lost.“Basically, whatever your specialty is, that’s what you want to find in the scrolls,” David Sider, a professor of classics at N.Y.U. and the author of “The Library of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum” (2005), told the The New Yorker, [Source: John Seabrook, The New Yorker , November 16, 2015 \=/]

Joshua Hammer wrote in Smithsonian Magazine: In 2015, “the National Research Council in Naples announced a solution to one of archaeology’s greatest challenges: reading the texts of papyrus scrolls cooked at Herculaneum by the fiery pyroclastic flow. Scientists had employed every imaginable tactic to unlock the secrets of the scrolls—prying them apart with unrolling machines, soaking them in chemicals—but the writing, inscribed in carbon-based ink and indistinguishable from the carbonized papyrus fibers, remained unreadable. And unspooling the papyrus caused further damage to the fragile material.~|~

“The researchers, headed by physicist Vito Mocella, applied a state-of-the-art method, X-ray phase-contrast tomography, to examine the writing without harming the papyrus. At the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, high-energy beams bombarded the scrolls and, by distinguishing contrasts between the slightly raised inked letters and the surface of the papyrus, enabled scientists to identify words, written in Greek. It marked the beginnings of an effort that Mocella calls “a revolution for papyrologists.” [Source: Joshua Hammer, Smithsonian Magazine, July 2015 ~|~]

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Rome sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Late Antiquity sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Forum Romanum forumromanum.org ; “Outlines of Roman History” by William C. Morey, Ph.D., D.C.L. New York, American Book Company (1901), forumromanum.org \~\; “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston, Revised by Mary Johnston, Scott, Foresman and Company (1903, 1932) forumromanum.org |+|; BBC Ancient Rome bbc.co.uk/history/ ; Perseus Project - Tufts University; perseus.tufts.edu ; MIT, Online Library of Liberty, oll.libertyfund.org ; Gutenberg.org gutenberg.org Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Live Science, Discover magazine, Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Encyclopædia Britannica, "The Discoverers" [∞] and "The Creators" [μ]" by Daniel Boorstin. "Greek and Roman Life" by Ian Jenkins from the British Museum.Time, Newsweek, Wikipedia, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides "History of Art" by H.W. Janson Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated October 2018