Wow this is exciting! New technology reading unopened and burned scrolls is near miraculous though I don't envy the amount of work that needs to be done. If written works that are known, from translation, can be found it would be interesting to read how accurately they were transcribed and translated over the centuries. Louie T.
Yes, given that it's an Epicurean-themed library, I feel like there's got to be a copy of De Rerum Natura in there that would be interesting to compare to ours.
I've got another Herculaneum question for you. It makes perfect sense that the most papyri would be in the home of a rich bibliophile who patronized a supported a philosophical writer on site.
But why haven't we found at least a few other carbonized paypri spread through Herculaneum? Is there something special about the villa, or were scrolls really that rare?
This is a great question with many possibilities, but altogether they don't quite form Roman concrete (if you will). It's worth mentioning that wax tablets were discovered in the Herculaneum town which do provide us insights into the bureaucratic administration of everyday life, justice, property, and slavery.
The Villa dei Papiri *was* incredibly special. There are villas all over Italy, but this one is really more of a palace imitating the great regal complexes of the Eastern rulers. With Emperors and their retinue likely having graced its halls, it's not an unreasonable comparison. It may be one of the largest residential complexes in ancient Rome and there is textual evidence of complaints about the size of some of the villas along the Bay. The Villa dei Papiri rivalled the nearby town of Herculaneum in size. An extraordinarily high concentration of scrolls is not surprising.
However, although scrolls were rare, I doubt they were so rare that pre-eruption they would only be found in a place like the Villa dei Papiri. I don't think there was as much papyri as the tens of thousands of papyri scraps found at the Oxyrhynchus dump in Egypt suggest (which have everything from literature to the most basic record keeping), but I'm sure there would be other scrolls in the region. Even if the precise environment needed for carbonization of the scrolls only occurred in Herculaneum, I would be shocked if there was no papyri in the town at all.
Why don't we have any, then? Well, we might. Likely more than half of the town of Herculaneum remains unexcavated, and was scarcely explored by Bourbon tunnels compared to the Villa dei Papiri or the Theatre. Painfully, perhaps 18th century hands did pass by scrolls but, looking rather like coal, they may have gone unappreciated. The Villa dei Papiri had hundreds of scrolls and it took some time before they were recognized for what they were. If there was a modest collection of scrolls somewhere else they may have been passed by enroute to something more spectacular.
Scrolls were found across many different rooms of the Villa dei Papiri, and many of them were in boxes or seemingly placed haphazardly. It's hard to tell what was caused by the trauma of the eruption, what was left by everyday habit, and what was abandoned in flight. The scrolls found in the Villa may simply be the ones left behind, ironically leading to better preservation compared to those taken elsewhere and vanished by time. Scrolls were certainly valuable, and as shown by the lack of human remains in Herculaneum, people had time to escape. Taking a handful of scrolls may have been a wise object to carry away (or loot by others).
And that's just the thing -- if scrolls were carried away from Herculaneum they are not necessarily lost. The scrolls may have been rescued millennia ago and through copying, translating, and editing over the centuries those texts may still be with us today.
I'm pumped about what might be on those scrolls. Even more pumped about the theoretical other floors. There are so many tantalizing summaries of lost voices exist in Lives of the Eminent Philosophers and Attics Nights and elsewhere that are tantalizing. And not to mention the lost Latin histories and other works.
I'm hoping the digital unrolling of the first 8k pages causes enough waves to get the Italian government and donors moving on further excavations.
I periodically hear that the villa is in danger from water seepage and/or another eruption. Do you have a feel on that? Are we running out of time for further excavations?
It's a tough equation. Excavation necessarily has devastating effects on the conservation of the Villa (and similar sites). there are stories of wonderful carbonized wood being unearthed only for them to immediately turn to dust at the lightest touch. I just returned from Herculaneum and other sites in the region (hence my late reply to you) and it was shocking to see in person just how much the frescoes have degraded over time. The reason the Vesuvian sites are almost time capsules is because of the utterly unique environment thrust upon them. Excavation removes that environment and the rapid decline or complete destruction of the materials commences immediately.
The main reason for the current moratorium on most further excavation of the Villa is that the remains already excavated throughout Campania are already proving too costly and difficult to maintain or preserve, let alone adding on a Villa half the size of the unearthed Herculaneum site. Not to mention, the modern city of Ercolano is directly above the villa and contains 18th century palaces and other buildings that are historical in their own right, and these buildings would need to be destroyed or at least removed to complete excavation work.
The question becomes: Is it better to leave the *possibility* of immaculately preserved finds for future generations, or to extract what we can now with the full knowledge that whatever is found will be irreparably damaged in the process? We have 270+ years of history with the Villa's papyri to provide context. We're seeing now how newer technology is allowing us to read texts that would have been impossible to recover in the past. Thankfully the earlier excavators had the sense to not hack open, dissolve, and tear all the papyri they found, so there remains a collection we can study with increasingly modern and less invasive methods. This lesson suggests that the Villa may be better off left buried until a time in which there is more certainty in the ability to minimize damage during excavation and to then continually maintain the costly structure for the foreseeable future.
That's my digression on the way to your question, which of course alters this equation dramatically. An eruption could happen at any time, not just from Vesuvius, but from the far larger Campi Flegrei super volcano which just last week experienced its largest quakes in 40 years. For flooding, Herculaneum and the Villa of Papyri lay under over 20 metres of volcanic debris, and the site today is essentially a pit around which towers a modern town. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, who previously directed both the Herculaneum Conservation Project and the British School at Rome, has stated that flooding and drainage is a huge problem at Herculaneum. For the Villa, there is water visibly cascading through the rock, debris, and 18th century tunnels through which the Villa was originally discovered.
Given this knowledge, perhaps excavation is necessary to intervene and recover whatever is there before more damage is done. Pessimistically, it might already be too late and whatever papyri might have been there could already have been washed away through the conduit created by human hands. It appears at this time there is no way to find out without going through the costly and damaging process of re-housing folks and beginning excavation in earnest.
Wow this is exciting! New technology reading unopened and burned scrolls is near miraculous though I don't envy the amount of work that needs to be done. If written works that are known, from translation, can be found it would be interesting to read how accurately they were transcribed and translated over the centuries. Louie T.
That's a good point. It's not only about 'new' texts, but gaining new perspectives on texts that otherwise only survive from later copies.
Yes, given that it's an Epicurean-themed library, I feel like there's got to be a copy of De Rerum Natura in there that would be interesting to compare to ours.
I've got another Herculaneum question for you. It makes perfect sense that the most papyri would be in the home of a rich bibliophile who patronized a supported a philosophical writer on site.
But why haven't we found at least a few other carbonized paypri spread through Herculaneum? Is there something special about the villa, or were scrolls really that rare?
This is a great question with many possibilities, but altogether they don't quite form Roman concrete (if you will). It's worth mentioning that wax tablets were discovered in the Herculaneum town which do provide us insights into the bureaucratic administration of everyday life, justice, property, and slavery.
The Villa dei Papiri *was* incredibly special. There are villas all over Italy, but this one is really more of a palace imitating the great regal complexes of the Eastern rulers. With Emperors and their retinue likely having graced its halls, it's not an unreasonable comparison. It may be one of the largest residential complexes in ancient Rome and there is textual evidence of complaints about the size of some of the villas along the Bay. The Villa dei Papiri rivalled the nearby town of Herculaneum in size. An extraordinarily high concentration of scrolls is not surprising.
However, although scrolls were rare, I doubt they were so rare that pre-eruption they would only be found in a place like the Villa dei Papiri. I don't think there was as much papyri as the tens of thousands of papyri scraps found at the Oxyrhynchus dump in Egypt suggest (which have everything from literature to the most basic record keeping), but I'm sure there would be other scrolls in the region. Even if the precise environment needed for carbonization of the scrolls only occurred in Herculaneum, I would be shocked if there was no papyri in the town at all.
Why don't we have any, then? Well, we might. Likely more than half of the town of Herculaneum remains unexcavated, and was scarcely explored by Bourbon tunnels compared to the Villa dei Papiri or the Theatre. Painfully, perhaps 18th century hands did pass by scrolls but, looking rather like coal, they may have gone unappreciated. The Villa dei Papiri had hundreds of scrolls and it took some time before they were recognized for what they were. If there was a modest collection of scrolls somewhere else they may have been passed by enroute to something more spectacular.
Scrolls were found across many different rooms of the Villa dei Papiri, and many of them were in boxes or seemingly placed haphazardly. It's hard to tell what was caused by the trauma of the eruption, what was left by everyday habit, and what was abandoned in flight. The scrolls found in the Villa may simply be the ones left behind, ironically leading to better preservation compared to those taken elsewhere and vanished by time. Scrolls were certainly valuable, and as shown by the lack of human remains in Herculaneum, people had time to escape. Taking a handful of scrolls may have been a wise object to carry away (or loot by others).
And that's just the thing -- if scrolls were carried away from Herculaneum they are not necessarily lost. The scrolls may have been rescued millennia ago and through copying, translating, and editing over the centuries those texts may still be with us today.
I'm pumped about what might be on those scrolls. Even more pumped about the theoretical other floors. There are so many tantalizing summaries of lost voices exist in Lives of the Eminent Philosophers and Attics Nights and elsewhere that are tantalizing. And not to mention the lost Latin histories and other works.
I'm hoping the digital unrolling of the first 8k pages causes enough waves to get the Italian government and donors moving on further excavations.
I periodically hear that the villa is in danger from water seepage and/or another eruption. Do you have a feel on that? Are we running out of time for further excavations?
It's a tough equation. Excavation necessarily has devastating effects on the conservation of the Villa (and similar sites). there are stories of wonderful carbonized wood being unearthed only for them to immediately turn to dust at the lightest touch. I just returned from Herculaneum and other sites in the region (hence my late reply to you) and it was shocking to see in person just how much the frescoes have degraded over time. The reason the Vesuvian sites are almost time capsules is because of the utterly unique environment thrust upon them. Excavation removes that environment and the rapid decline or complete destruction of the materials commences immediately.
The main reason for the current moratorium on most further excavation of the Villa is that the remains already excavated throughout Campania are already proving too costly and difficult to maintain or preserve, let alone adding on a Villa half the size of the unearthed Herculaneum site. Not to mention, the modern city of Ercolano is directly above the villa and contains 18th century palaces and other buildings that are historical in their own right, and these buildings would need to be destroyed or at least removed to complete excavation work.
The question becomes: Is it better to leave the *possibility* of immaculately preserved finds for future generations, or to extract what we can now with the full knowledge that whatever is found will be irreparably damaged in the process? We have 270+ years of history with the Villa's papyri to provide context. We're seeing now how newer technology is allowing us to read texts that would have been impossible to recover in the past. Thankfully the earlier excavators had the sense to not hack open, dissolve, and tear all the papyri they found, so there remains a collection we can study with increasingly modern and less invasive methods. This lesson suggests that the Villa may be better off left buried until a time in which there is more certainty in the ability to minimize damage during excavation and to then continually maintain the costly structure for the foreseeable future.
That's my digression on the way to your question, which of course alters this equation dramatically. An eruption could happen at any time, not just from Vesuvius, but from the far larger Campi Flegrei super volcano which just last week experienced its largest quakes in 40 years. For flooding, Herculaneum and the Villa of Papyri lay under over 20 metres of volcanic debris, and the site today is essentially a pit around which towers a modern town. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, who previously directed both the Herculaneum Conservation Project and the British School at Rome, has stated that flooding and drainage is a huge problem at Herculaneum. For the Villa, there is water visibly cascading through the rock, debris, and 18th century tunnels through which the Villa was originally discovered.
Given this knowledge, perhaps excavation is necessary to intervene and recover whatever is there before more damage is done. Pessimistically, it might already be too late and whatever papyri might have been there could already have been washed away through the conduit created by human hands. It appears at this time there is no way to find out without going through the costly and damaging process of re-housing folks and beginning excavation in earnest.
Thanks for that context!