Photo of a rolled up, charred scroll uncovered from the Herculaneum library which was buried under volcanic ash in AD 70 Photo credit: www.npr.org |
To appreciate the NPR article, let me digress a bit to explain succinctly the process that archaeologists and papyrologists undertake to reconstruct an ancient text from papyri. When I work with the ancient texts, I almost always deal with the published form, like this example from Richard Janko's Philodemus: On Poems, Book 1 (The Asthetic Works 1:1; New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 260:
Print edition: P Herc 460, Column 67, lines 1-10 |
But in order for me to read the above, some enterprising papyrologist had to do the hard work of unrolling a brittle, charred scroll. As soon as you unroll the scroll, it starts to fall apart and you are left with hundreds of fragments that need to be carefully put together with the other fragments in correct order, much like how a person has to solve a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle, but in this case, you might be missing many of the pieces, or some of the pieces are stuck together and you have to take them apart before finishing the puzzle. Here is the same text above but as a photo of its original fragment:
Photo of P Herc 460, fragment 1 |
Almost completely illegible charred Herc papyrus fragment Photo Credit: The Friends of the Herculaneum Society |
Fragments from an unrolled scroll put back together Photo credit: www.npr.org |
P Herc 460, frag 1-4, redrawn by F. Casanova (frag 1 is highlighted in yellow) |
Want to watch a video demonstration of the process? See the youtube video demonstration below from the University of Kentucky lab team. Wow!
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