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On 19 October 1752, a discovery was made 20 metres underneath the town of Resina, near Naples in Italy. Peasants digging wells in the area around Mount Vesuvius had struck marble statuary and mosaic pavements 鈥� and they also found lumps of carbon.

Initially, they were tossed aside 鈥� the lumps weren鈥檛 considered valuable or pretty, so were of no interest. But thankfully, someone noticed they were all about the same size and shape, and investigated further. It was soon discovered the carbonised lumps they thought were rolled-up hunting or fishing nets, or bolts of cloth, in fact contained writing.

What these peasants had found turned out to be a huge building from the ancient Roman age, when the town was known as Herculaneum.听听suggest that nearly three square kilometres of it have never been explored. The carbonised lumps turned out to be papyrus scrolls belonging to a great library full of Roman writing that had been thought lost. For this reason, the building is now known as the听.

Papyrus is an Egyptian reed and type of paper common in the ancient Mediterranean that was made from its pith. When Vesuvius erupted in AD79 鈥� the same eruption that buried Pompeii 鈥� the papyrus rolls in the villa were carbonised. Without enough oxygen to combust and turn to ash, they became charcoal instead.

This meant the scrolls were fused solid and to get at the writing inside, they had to be opened. This process has been ongoing since the 1750s and researchers have just entered a new stage,听. The lumps of carbonised scroll have been digitally scanned and, using 3D mapping and AI, researchers have been unable to 鈥渧irtually unroll鈥� the papyri and detect letters. This process has, for example, allowed them to read a previously unknown philosophical work discussing the senses and pleasure by the Epicurean philosopher and poet, Philodemus.

I have worked on the scrolls in the Herculaneum library since 2010, when I began my PhD thesis on Philodemus鈥檚 text听. I worked on the papyri in Naples for a year and a half from 2013, and still visit them nearly every summer.

The news that we could finally read these still rolled-up papyri hit me like a lightning bolt. In the past, opening the scrolls, even those in excellent condition that unrolled easily, caused damage to them 鈥� especially the outsides that contain the beginning of each text. This means no one alive has ever read the first sentence of a Herculaneum text, only the first visible, surviving sentence.

Unrolling and reading the library

When research on the scrolls began in the mid-18th century, the rolls were simply cut into halves or more pieces, then the insides were scooped out until legible text was revealed. The drawback of this approach is obvious 鈥� large parts of the best-preserved parts of scrolls were destroyed 鈥� so a better solution was sought.

In 1753, Italian priest and scholar听, on loan from the Vatican library, invented a machine to unroll the papyri by slowly pulling the outer layer off. Hundreds of Herculaneum papyri were thus unrolled, though their harder outer bits were cut off to get at the better preserved insides. Piaggio鈥檚 machine was remarkably successful, and the papyri unrolled on it have fuelled two-and-a-half centuries of scholarship so far.

But not every scroll could be unrolled this way 鈥� and up to 300 of these still rolled-up scrolls, out of the 800 or so found originally, have been set aside until now.

Links

• Dr Michael McOsker's academic profile听
• 最准的六合彩论坛 Greek & Latin

• 最准的六合彩论坛 Arts & Humanities