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Podcast Transcript
In the mid-18th century, excavations in the ancient town of Herculaneum, just outside the city of Pompeii and destroyed by the same volcano, discovered something….interesting.
They found a villa that contained 1800 ancient scrolls. Unfortunately, the volcano’s heat carbonized them, making them illegible and incredibly fragile. Still, for over 250 years, scholars have hoped that techniques would eventually be developed to allow these scrolls to be read.
That day may have finally arrived.
Learn more about the Herculaneum Papyri and the attempts to read and preserve their ancient knowledge on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
There are several different aspects to this story, but before I get into anything, I should explain exactly what the Herculaneum Papyri are and why this is worth discussing.
Herculaneum was a small coastal community on the Mediterranean coast not far from Pompeii. During the Roman era, it was an enclave for the Roman elite.
I’ve done a previous episode on Pompeii, so I’m not going to repeat what happened here, but suffice it to say Herculaneum was destroyed in the same eruption in the year 79.
What destroyed Herculaneum, just like Pompeii, were pyroclastic flows. These are super hot clouds of volcanic ash that rush down the volcano. You can’t outrun it, and you can’t survive it.
While the pyroclastic flows were incredibly hot, they quickly buried the buildings in ash, removing oxygen and preventing many otherwise flammable things from burning.
Fast-forward to the year 1752. The King of Naples, Charles VII, who was also King Charles III of Spain, employed workmen who discovered a villa while conducting excavations in Herculaneum.
Ethel Ross Barker noted in her 1908 book Buried Herculaneum.
A large number of papyri, after being buried eighteen centuries, have been found in the Villa named after them. In appearance, the rolls resembled lumps of charcoal, and many were thrown away as such. Some were much lighter in color. Finally, a faint trace of letters was seen on one of the blackened masses, which was found to be a roll of papyrus, disintegrated by decay and damp, full of holes, cut, crushed, and crumpled. The papyri were found at a depth of about 120 feet (37 meters).
The excavations were not the careful digs that can be seen at modern archeological sites. It was extremely rough, and many of the scrolls were damaged.
Further excavations were conducted in 1828, and by 1855, almost all of the currently known scrolls had been found.
Currently, there are 1,826 scrolls that have been found. Three hundred forty are believed to be complete or near-complete, 970 are primarily complete but partially decayed, and 500 are just fragments.
I should note that these scrolls do not look like scrolls. If you see a photo of one, it looks like a burnt log. They are black and charred, and it comes as no surprise that the first people who discovered them probably thought nothing of their findings.
The takeaway is that while they were able to identify them as scrolls because they could see the writing on a few of them, for the most part, the carbonization made them completely illegible. Moreover, the scrolls couldn’t be unrolled because they would fall apart because they were close to being ash. Several attempts were made to unroll them, using many different techniques, and the scrolls fell apart, or the remaining ink became illegible.
Today, most of the scrolls are held at the National Library of Naples, with a few others located at other libraries and museums that were gifts given out in the 19th century.
The Villa of the Papyri, named after the scrolls, was believed to have been originally built by Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar.
So, for over 200 years, these scrolls have existed and could not be read because of their condition.
Now, I want to shift gears completely and talk about something at the meta-level. The big question is, how do we know what we know about the ancient world?
The harsh reality is that what we know about the ancient world has been pieced together from surviving texts and archeology.
The truth is, there are very few examples of original writings on papyrus or parchment that have ever been found. The Dead Sea Scrolls are some of the oldest. There are no original scrolls from ancient Rome.
Everything we have has been copied over and over for centuries. Caesar’s commentaries….copied. The works of Aristotle…. copied.
Well over 99% of everything that was written during this period has disappeared. There are many texts we know existed because they are referenced in surviving texts, but we don’t have the originals.
Given how much we don’t have from ancient Rome, we know more about Rome than most other ancient civilizations, which is saying a lot.
Just to give you an example of how much we don’t know, about 130 bronze dodecahedrons have been discovered throughout Europe dating back to the Roman Empire, and we have no clue what they are for. Each one is slightly different, but they are all hollow 12-sided objects.
There is nothing in any writing or inscriptions which references them. There are lots of theories about what possible purpose they could serve, but the truth is, we just don’t know.
This is what makes the Herculaneum Papyri so compelling. Here, we have almost 2000 original scrolls of varying levels of completeness. Some of them might be copies of what we currently have. Some of them might be texts that we know were written because they were referenced in previous works, and some might be wholly original texts that we never even knew existed.
And, what is even more compelling, there might be another level below the Villa of the Papyri which has never been excavated. There have been calls to excavate it as soon as possible because, in the event of another eruption of Vesuvius, it might be very difficult ever to excavate again.
Now, I want to move back to the 20th and 21st century.
One of the smartest things the museum officials who held the scrolls did over the years was…..nothing.
When most people encounter a problem, the initial reaction is to do something. Indeed, something was tried on the Herculaneum Papyri. There were attempts to try to unroll the scrolls over the years using a host of chemicals and other methods, but everything failed.
Eventually, they just gave up and hoped that some future technology would come along that could solve the problem.
That was the right decision.
One of the techniques used in the late 1990s was conducted on scrolls where unrolling attempts had been made. Even though they were in pieces, they could still be analyzed.
Researchers used infrared photography to enhance the contrast between the ink and the papyrus, making the text more readable. This technique revealed previously invisible writing on many scrolls.
They initially found that using infrared light in the 950-nanometer band was able to increase the contrast between the charred papyrus and the ink. Later experiments found that it was even better between the 1000 and 2500 nanometer wavelengths.
Researchers have been able to decipher what was on several scrolls using this method. They found philosophical works by the Epicurian philosopher Philodemus of Gadara and a poem about the Battle of Actium.
While this technique was a huge step forward, there was a problem. It only worked on the exposed surface of a scroll. Most of the scrolls were still rolled up and, for the reasons I mentioned, couldn’t be unrolled.
Also, even when a scroll was unrolled, it was often mounted to a frame, sometimes using glue. The problem is that some of the scrolls had writing on each side of the paper.
So, how do you go about getting text from a carbonized 2000-year-old scroll that can’t be unwound and might have writing on both sides of the tightly wound surface?
The answer is to unroll the scroll virtually.
It was done using a technique called X-ray phase-contrast tomography, also known as XPCT.
Tomography is a general term used to describe many different methods for imaging the interior of an object via penetrating waves, usually X-rays or other high-energy waves. The type of tomography you are probably most familiar with is computed axial tomography scan or CAT scans, which are used in medicine.
XPCT is an even more sophisticated technique. Normal X-rays work because of the different absorption levels of bones vs flesh in your body. In the case of the Herculaneum Papyri, there is almost no absorption difference between the papyrus and the ink.
XPCT can detect smaller changes in the wave phase of the X-rays as they go through the scroll.
Researchers took a full volumetric scan of four scrolls, creating a 3D model of the rolled scroll.
That part, while technically sophisticated, was relatively easy. The hard part was to virtually unroll the 3D model they created, and then to analyze the virtually unrolled script to try and detect the differences between the papyrus and the ink so it could be read.
In an effort to solve the problem of deciphering the scan, a group of American businessmen established the Vesuvius Challenge in March 2023. They put up one million dollars for whoever could achieve a series of goals regarding deciphering the scrolls, including a $700,000 grand prize.
It didn’t take long for results to start coming in.
By October, a computer science student at the University of Nebraska won $40,000 for deciphering the first word from a rolled scroll. The word he found was “purple,” written in Greek.
It only took another four months for the grand prize of $700,000. A team of three from Germany, Switzerland, and the same student, Luke Farritor, from the University of Nebraska, claimed the prize by deciphering 5% of a scroll.
The scroll appears to be a previously unknown work from Philodemus.
The winning team used a form of artificial intelligence to read the text on the scrolls.
5% is fine for a proof of concept, but it is a far cry from a full transcription of the scrolls.
That is why the team behind the Vesuvius Challenge has announced a new challenge for 2024. This time there are several prizes. The grand prize is for the first team who can decipher 90% of the text on all four of the scanned scrolls.
There are additional prizes for teams to who do what the 2023 prize winners did in less time and more efficiently, as well as finding the titles of the scrolls.
The sheer number of scrolls that could be read using this technique is enormous, and it has the potential to vastly expand our knowledge of Ancient Rome and/or Greece. They might find a new philosophical treatise or maybe something that would finally tell us what the dodecahedrons are all about.
On several occasions, I’ve had to do updates to episodes to cover new material that has come to light. For this episode, I’m 100% sure that an update will be necessary at some point in the future. I don’t know when that will happen and I don’t know what new information they will find, but I’m sure there will absolutely be some sort of update.
The Herculaneum Papyri are a fascinating mix of the ancient and the modern. Despite having been written over 2000 years ago and having survived a volcano, they may now be able to be read once again thanks to the computing and imaging tools of the modern world.
