Herculaneum Scrolls: History and Efforts to Unwrap Them | Early European History And Religion

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HERCULANEUM SCROLLS

Villa dei Papiri reborn as the Getty Museum in Los Angeles

In the 1750s excavators recovered 1,500 papyri from the Villa dei Papiri. Today these are are generally referred to as the Herculaneum Scrolls or Herculaneum Papyri. 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 ~|~]

Websites on Ancient Rome: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Rome sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Late Antiquity sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; BBC Ancient Rome bbc.co.uk/history; Perseus Project - Tufts University; perseus.tufts.edu ; Lacus Curtius penelope.uchicago.edu; The Internet Classics Archive classics.mit.edu ; Bryn Mawr Classical Review bmcr.brynmawr.edu; Cambridge Classics External Gateway to Humanities Resources web.archive.org; 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

Villa dei Papiri

Villa dei Papyri plan

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. \=/

“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.” \=/

History of the Herculaneum Scrolls

Herculaneum Scroll unraveled

The Herculaneum Papyri scrolls were discovered in 1752 by a farmer after being buried almost 27 meters (90 feet) under volcano rock in the Villa dei Papiri. At first, most of the charred scrolls were thought to just be charcoal. It was only when someone noticed the faint trace of letters that the breadth of historical knowledge trapped under carbonised papyrus was recognised.

John Seabrook wrote in The New Yorker: At least eight hundred scrolls were uncovered; they constitute the only sizable library from the ancient world known to have survived intact. Some were found stacked on shelves in a small room; others were elsewhere in the villa, packed in capsae, travelling boxes for the scrolls, presumably in preparation for flight. Given the splendor of the villa, and the masterly bronze sculptures found in its ruins, the learned world assumed that the library would contain vanished classics. [Source: John Seabrook, The New Yorker , November 16, 2015 \=/]

“The discovery of the first cache of scrolls, in October, 1752, was reported the following month in a letter sent by Camillo Paderni to Dr. Richard Mead. Paderni was a painter and copyist from Rome, who had come to Herculaneum to reproduce some of the villa’s wall paintings. Somehow he managed to get Charles, Ferdinand’s father, to appoint him “keeper” of the royal museum at Portici, where the sculptures and the scrolls were kept. Mead was a distinguished British physician, a fellow of the Royal Society, and a noted book collector, with a library of more than a hundred thousand volumes in his house in Bloomsbury, which was dispersed in an epic, fifty-six-day auction after his death, in 1754. In corresponding with Paderni, Mead may have hoped to obtain the ultimate prize before he died—a newly discovered great work of classical literature, of which there existed but a single copy. \=/

“Paderni’s letter was read to the Royal Society, which met monthly in Crane Court, off Fleet Street, in February of 1753, and was published in the society’s “Philosophical Transactions” for that year. The news of a recently discovered ancient library captivated Europe. The scrolls, together with the bronze statues, and the opportunity to descend into the theatre of Herculaneum, were the reason that Naples became a stop on the eighteenth-century gentleman’s Grand Tour. (“See Naples and die.”) Who could resist the chance to peer into a lost masterpiece from antiquity? The scrolls must have enhanced Charles’s stature; in 1759 he assumed the throne of Spain, leaving his son Ferdinand to rule Naples and Sicily. \=/

“by 1800, the Herculaneum scrolls had become instruments of diplomatic and political power. In 1802, Ferdinand, the Bourbon king of Naples and Sicily, “gave” six of the scrolls to Napoleon, who was threatening to invade Naples. Napoleon housed them in the Institut de France, which he reorganized in 1803 into what would later become the five academies that form the institute today. The collection grew around the scrolls; that’s why the box Delattre showed me was labelled “Objet Un.” But the scrolls did not satisfy Napoleon for long; capitalizing on victory in the Battle of Austerlitz, France invaded Naples in 1806, forcing Ferdinand and his court to flee to Sicily, leaving the scrolls in nearby Portici, where they were housed in a royal museum. When Britain helped restore Ferdinand to the throne, in 1815, he was so grateful that he is rumored to have bestowed eighteen scrolls on the British Prince Regent, later George IV, who in turn gave the Neapolitan court eighteen live kangaroos from the British colony of New South Wales. Some of these scrolls ended up in Oxford, but a few are still unaccounted for. The fate of the kangaroos is even less clear. \=/

Trying to Read Papyrus Scrolls of Herculaneum

a fragment by Philodemus

John Seabrook wrote in The New Yorker: “In trying to read the scrolls, scholars and curators have invariably damaged or destroyed them. The Herculaneum papyri survived only because all the moisture was seared out of them—uncharred papyrus scrolls in non-desert climates have long since rotted away. In each scroll, the tightly wrapped layers of the fibrous pith of the papyrus plant are welded together, like a burrito left in the back seat of a car for two thousand years. But, because the sheets are so dry, when they are unfurled they risk crumbling into dust. [Source: John Seabrook, The New Yorker , November 16, 2015 \=/]

“During the past two hundred and fifty years, an array of methods and materials have been used on the easier-to-unwrap scrolls, including rose water, mercury, “vegetable gas,” sulfuric compounds, and papyrus juice—most of which have caused grievous harm to the delicate plant material on which the text is inscribed. Scores of scrolls have been badly damaged or destroyed, ruined by the same uniquely human impulse that went into making them—the desire to read. \=/

“Among the Villa dei Papiri scrolls are many that were written in Latin; these were mostly found in the capsae, presumably because someone was trying to save them, but they are more likely to contain literary works by Roman writers. And the Latin papyri are in even worse condition than the Greek ones. Sarah Hendriks, a young Australian papyrologist whom I met in the National Library in Naples, who works on the Latin scrolls, said, “While it is relatively easy to find individual letters, finding whole words can be only a weekly or monthly occurrence at most. Whole lines of text are extremely rare. I often look with envy at the Greek papyri!”“ \=/

Opening the Herculaneum Scrolls in the 18th Century

John Seabrook wrote in The New Yorker: “Charles told Paderni to see about opening the scrolls, and the keeper, whom the historian Charles Seltman described as “a lazy sycophant of a man,” saw to it. In his letter to Mead, Paderni noted that the papyrus had “turn’d to a sort of charcoal, so brittle, that, being touched, it falls readily into ashes.” He continued, “Nevertheless, by his Majesty’s orders, I have made many trials to open them, but all to no purpose; excepting some words.” As David Blank, of U.C.L.A., a prominent American papyrologist, told me, Paderni at first simply cut the scrolls in half lengthwise. He removed the less charred midollo, or marrow, and then scraped away at the outer layers—the scorza, or bark, as it was called—until writing could be seen. (Only later did he realize that the midollo was, in fact, the most legible part.) Blank said, “Charles wanted visible writing that he could show to his important visitors.” [Source: John Seabrook, The New Yorker , November 16, 2015 \=/]

“In 1753, Charles brought in Father Antonio Piaggio, from the Vatican Library, who built a machine to unwrap the scrolls, very slowly, at the rate of a centimetre an hour—the so-called Piaggio Machine. Johann Winckelmann, the German archeologist and art historian, described Piaggio’s work in his “Letter on the Herculaneum Discoveries,” published in 1762: \=/

the Piaggio machine

“It is incredible to imagine what this man [Piaggio] contrived and executed. He made a machine, with which, (by the means of certain threads, which, being gummed, stuck to the back part of the papyrus, where there was no writing), he begins, by degrees, to pull, while with a sort of ingraver’s instrument he loosens one leaf from the other, (which is the most difficult part of all). \=/

“It was four years before the first scrolls were successfully unwrapped, but eventually Piaggio managed to unwrap fifty more, some dozens of feet long, with his machine. And what lost masterpieces did he reveal? Not Livy, or Sappho, or Simonides, the Greek lyric poet whom William Wordsworth invoked in his poem “September, 1819”:
“O ye, who patiently explore
The wreck of Herculaneum lore,
What rapture! could ye seize
Some Theban fragment, or unroll
One precious, tender-hearted scroll
Of pure Simonides.

“Most of the scrolls, including the first one unwrapped by Piaggio, “On Music, Book 4,” were written by the same person—a minor Greek poet and philosopher named Philodemus. Who was he? A nineteenth-century commentator called him “an obscure, verbose, inauthentic Epicurean from Cicero’s time.” Thanks to decades of painstaking work by Father Piaggio and his successors, we have the final book of Philodemus’ multivolume “On Music,” large parts of his “Rhetoric,” and his “On the Stoics,” “On the Good King According to Homer,” “On Flattery,” “On Wealth,” and “On Anger,” among many others. In some cases, there are multiple copies of the same book. [Source: John Seabrook, The New Yorker , November 16, 2015 \=/]

“Philodemus was born about two hundred and thirty years after Epicurus, and was a member of the Athens school of Epicurean thought. He also wrote epigrams, of which Cicero speaks archly (he calls him a “Greekling”). Several of these are dedicated to Piso, Caesar’s father-in-law. Like many late-Republic Roman aristocrats, Piso was a follower of Epicurus, and he seems to have been Philodemus’ patron. At some point during the Roman takeover of Athens, Philodemus is believed to have moved to Herculaneum, bringing his library with him. The villa thought to have been built by Piso could have held Philodemus’ library. (The reasoning for both these theories is circular: because Philodemus was connected to Piso, and because the works were found in a villa that few Romans other than Piso were rich enough to build, the house probably belonged to Piso, and Piso’s villa could have held Philodemus’ library.) \=/

Papyrology

John Seabrook wrote in The New Yorker: “Papyrology is a study that combines aspects of textual scholarship, philology, and archeology. It requires Olympian patience to find letters and words amid such badly damaged material, and immense learning to divine the meaning within. It’s unusual to get three words in a row without lacunae. [Source: John Seabrook, The New Yorker , November 16, 2015 \=/]

“Compounding the difficulty is the fact that scribes wrote Greek without spaces between words. A single line can easily take six months to decipher. Sometimes educated guesses about missing bits are wrong, causing the reader to arrive at different meanings from what was intended. One of the revelations following the Brigham Young MSI studies was how wrong many of the earlier readings of the scrolls were. Some editors were essentially making up their own texts.

““Papyrologists are a special breed,” Anthony Grafton, a professor of Renaissance and Reformation history at Princeton, says. “They work with really badly damaged manuscripts. But they live with the promise of finding something really new—which is very rare in most classical scholarship.” There, marginalia is the only hope.” \=/

What Herculaneum Scrolls Look Like: A Human Turd

John Seabrook wrote in The New Yorker: “Daniel Delattre’s dream has been to recover something of the lost works of Epicurus (341-270 B.C.), the Greek philosopher whose thought has been the focus of his life’s study, and whose writings are known only through secondary sources.” At the library of the Institut de France, which includes the Académie Française, the 68-year-old Delattre, “was contemplating a small wooden box on the table in front of him which was labelled “Objet Un.”... An ornately hand-lettered card was taped to the outside. It said, in French, “Box containing the remains of papyrus from Herculaneum”. \=/ [Source: John Seabrook, The New Yorker , November 16, 2015 \=/]

current state of many of the Herculaneum scrolls

“Before addressing Objet Un, Delattre opened another box, containing pieces of two scrolls (the institute has six altogether) that had suffered a misguided attempt to read them in 1985. There were hundreds of fragments, organized within a set of smaller boxes. They resembled scraps of dried mud. But if you looked closely you could see tiny Greek letters on the warped surfaces, made by a scribe two thousand years ago—an electrifying jolt of handwritten human communication from the ancient world. \=/

“Delattre explained that the two ill-fated scrolls had been transported to Naples, where they were treated with a mixture of ethanol, glycerin, and warm water, which was supposed to loosen the folds. One scroll was peeled apart into many fragments; the other dried up and then, like a disaster in slow motion, split apart into more than three hundred pieces. “Well,” Delattre murmured, “it simply exploded.” He shook his head sadly. Delattre placed his hands on the box containing Objet Un. But he did not open it. He prepared his guests for the worst—the shock of seeing the body in the morgue. When he finally lifted the lid, you saw why. Swaddled in thick cotton was what appeared to be a human turd. \=/

“Virtually Unwrapping” the Herculaneum Scrolls

John Seabrook wrote in The New Yorker: “One glance at the scroll was enough to be sure there was no hope it could ever be unwrapped physically. But what about virtually?... In 2005, Delattre attended a meeting in Oxford of the Friends of Herculaneum Society, a group of professional papyrologists and amateur Herculaneum enthusiasts. The keynote speaker was Brent Seales, a software engineer who is the head of the computer-science department at the University of Kentucky. He gave a talk about the possibility of “virtually unwrapping” the scrolls, using a combination of molecular-level X-ray technology, spectral-imaging techniques, and software designed by him and his students at the university. [Source: John Seabrook, The New Yorker , November 16, 2015 \=/]

“Digital restoration—the application of modern imaging technology to the reading of ancient manuscripts—is not exactly Seales’s idea, but it has become his mission. His work has brought him renown in papyrological circles, and has made him something of a celebrity on campus in Lexington, where the school newspaper regularly reports on his progress. Seales does much of his manuscript work at the university’s Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments, where he is the director. “The idea is that you’re not just conserving the image digitally—you can actually restore it digitally,” Seales explained, in his earnest, go-getter way. The potential struck him in 1995, when he was assisting Kevin Kiernan, an English professor, on a digital-imaging project involving the only extant copy of “Beowulf,” the medieval masterwork, which is in the British Library. The manuscript was damaged in a fire in 1731. The Kentucky team used a variety of techniques, including one called multispectral imaging, or MSI—developed by NASA for use in mapping mineral deposits during planetary flyovers—to make the letters stand out from the charred background. The basic principle is that different surfaces reflect light differently, especially in the infrared part of the spectrum. Inked letters will therefore reflect at different wavelengths from those of the parchment or vellum or papyrus they are written on. \=/

“As Seales worked on more manuscripts, he realized that what he had thought of as a two-dimensional problem was really three-dimensional. As a writing surface ages, it crinkles and buckles. If Seales could design software that reverse-engineered that aging process with an algorithm—“something like the stuff that lets you see the flag waving in reverse,” as he put it—he might be able to virtually flatten the manuscript. Back in Kentucky, Seales and his team put their concept to the test with King Alfred the Great’s Old English translation of “The Consolation of Philosophy,” by Boethius, which is also in the British Library. They studied the material science of the vellum that the medieval scribe had used, and, by modelling that on the computer, Seales was able to virtually smooth out the manuscript, making some letters visible for the first time. \=/

“Seales’s name got around to the curators of collections containing badly damaged manuscripts; he was the guy who could read the unreadable. “I came to think of it as the ‘impossible scenario,’ ” he said. “Every time we’d go to a collection, people would pull out stuff they couldn’t do anything with, and say, ‘O.K., you can do something with that, but what about this?’ ” \=/

various machines devised to read the Herculaneum papyri

“Richard Janko, a classical scholar at the University of Michigan and a leading papyrologist, heard of Seales’s work and talked to him about the Herculaneum papyri—the ultimate impossible scenario, because reading them meant not only flattening deformed surfaces but also seeing inside scrolls that had never been unwrapped at all. In 1999 and 2000, a team from Brigham Young University had, in fact, conducted an MSI study on some of the scrolls that had already been opened. They achieved spectacular results on the surfaces. But they could do nothing with the hundreds of scrolls that hadn’t been unrolled. \=/

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Rome sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Late Antiquity sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; “Outlines of Roman History” by William C. Morey, Ph.D., D.C.L. New York, American Book Company (1901) ; “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston, Revised by Mary Johnston, Scott, Foresman and Company (1903, 1932); BBC Ancient Rome bbc.co.uk/history/ ; Project Gutenberg gutenberg.org ; Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Live Science, Discover magazine, Archaeology magazine, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, The New Yorker, Wikipedia, Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopedia.com and various other books, websites and publications.

Last updated November 2024