About 2,000 years ago, Mount Vesuvius buried a vast collection of scrolls in ash and burned them into solid black lumps. Now, without exposing them, researchers have virtually read two of them – and uncovered work by a famous Stoic philosopher.
success comes from here vesuvius challengeAn international research effort to digitally read the scrolls preserved when Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried under ash and pumice in 79 AD. Papyrologists, who study and preserve ancient manuscripts, announced on June 25 that they had digitally unearthed what remained of a scroll, known as PHERC. 1667, revealing approximately 5 feet (1.5 m) of continuous Greek text in 20 columns. Researchers also recovered more than 70 columns of text from the second scroll, PHERC. 172.
“For nearly two millennia, many of these texts have been physically preserved but intellectually inaccessible,” Brent SealsCo-founder of the Vesuvius Challenge and a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky said in a statement. “Today – after years of interdisciplinary work combining Advanced Imaging, Artificial IntelligenceAcademic research and an innovation competition – we’re finally able to read them.”
Over the past few years, Seals and his team have used a synchrotron to essentially X-ray the inside of the scroll and trace ink The ancient Romans wrote. The letters are then studied by papyrologists, who translate the text.
Part of PHERC. 1667 was physically opened in the 1980s, but overlapping layers obscured the writing so badly that the scroll was given a readability score of zero, Federica Nicolardia papyrologist at the University of Naples Federico II said in the statement.
PHERC’s handwriting and text. 1667 shows that the scroll dates to the 2nd or 3rd century BC, making it one of the oldest scrolls in the Herculaneum collection. This early date means that it could not have been written by Philodemus of GadaraEpicurean philosopher of the 1st century BC whose writings dominate the Herculaneum Library.
Experts believe the text to be a Stoic treatise on ethics and human behavior, and specifically mentions Aristocreon, the nephew and disciple of the influential Stoic philosopher. chrysippus. Very little of Chrysippus’s own writings survives, so if this attribution holds, it would be a significant addition to the historical record of early Stoic thought.
In a separate discovery, researchers identified a new book title within the scroll PHERC. 139. At the end of the scroll a reference is made to the eighth book of Philodemus, “On the Gods”. While the existence of this treatise was previously known, the new discovery reveals a work extending into at least eight volumes. Experts plan to re-examine other texts in the Herculaneum collection for additional fragments that may belong to the same series.
More than 600 of the Herculaneum Scrolls are still unopened. It is believed that the villa was once owned by his father-in-law Julius Caesar.
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