Advances in Reading the Herculaneum Scrolls

[I_am_not_mafia]

I'd take a kitchen list, too. In a way, I find these documents of ordinary daily life more fascinating than official documents or writings, because they let these long gone times appear much more real - some guy writing a shopping list 2000 years ago gives me a direct connection to real human beings and their concerns. For example, one of the things that left the biggest impression on me in the Forum Romanum was not the monumental architecture, but the marble game that had been etched into the stairs of the Basilica Iulia. Someone did that - who knows who he or she was - bored and in need of a board game.

That's what I love about reading about history and war. I'm not in any way interested in what battalion did what or what the generals were up to. I'm interested in personal accounts from ordinary people forced into extraordinary situations. People who could otherwise be friends in another time and place end up killing and maiming each other on the orders of someone high up in command. I'm interested in how a society full of ordinary human beings can be manipulated into placing themselves in such situations.

[vorlon13]

even Etruscan romance novels would be interesting . . .

[The Grand Nudger]

Some it just -has- to be pron.

[vorlon13]

undoubtedly

[Minimalist]

What has been deciphered in the past ( c 1750 ) has been disappointing.  Calpurnius Piso seems to have been a patron of a minor Greek philosopher named Philodemus.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/1...le-library

It was four years before the first scrolls were successfully unwrapped, but eventually Piaggio managed to unwrap fifty more, some dozens of feet long, with his machine. And what lost masterpieces did he reveal? Not Livy, or Sappho, or Simonides, the Greek lyric poet whom William Wordsworth invoked in his poem “September, 1819”:

O ye, who patiently explore
The wreck of Herculaneum lore,
What rapture! could ye seize
Some Theban fragment, or unroll
One precious, tender-hearted scroll
Of pure Simonides.

Most of the scrolls, including the first one unwrapped by Piaggio, “On Music, Book 4,” were written by the same person—a minor Greek poet and philosopher named Philodemus. Who was he? A nineteenth-century commentator called him “an obscure, verbose, inauthentic Epicurean from Cicero’s time.” Thanks to decades of painstaking work by Father Piaggio and his successors, we have the final book of Philodemus’ multivolume “On Music,” large parts of his “Rhetoric,” and his “On the Stoics,” “On the Good King According to Homer,” “On Flattery,” “On Wealth,” and “On Anger,” among many others. In some cases, there are multiple copies of the same book.

Of course, that is not to say that there might not be lost works of other more important writers but so far it seems that have merely broken into the "P" section of the library.

[I_am_not_mafia]

It would be especially funny if they referred to the Jesus Christ joke they play on gullible tourists to fleece them of their money.

[Minimalist]

Would be funny but I doubt that the whole jesus myth had spread any where outside of the Levant.  The first Greco-Roman author to write the name "jesus" was Celsus in the late 2d century and by then Herculaneum had been buried for over 100 years.

[CapnAwesome]

I love history and spend most of my time living unashamedly in the long distant past.

I've always said, if someone created a theme park for me with a huge historically accurate set piece of life based around the Viking time and populated it with other people willing to suspend their disbelief and live as historically accurately as possible, I'd do that for the rest of my life.

I'd even be willing to give up the Internet to do it.

I suspect it would be a lot more boring then you'd probably think. Most of the time spent planting crops and trying not to be hungry.

[Minimalist]

I love history and spend most of my time living unashamedly in the long distant past.

I've always said, if someone created a theme park for me with a huge historically accurate set piece of life based around the Viking time and populated it with other people willing to suspend their disbelief and live as historically accurately as possible, I'd do that for the rest of my life.

I'd even be willing to give up the Internet to do it.

Here you go.

http://guide.visitskane.com/en/to-do/a32...howdetails

Foteviken Viking village, Höllviken - Set the time machine to the Viking Era, and come to Foteviken Museum. Here, in a recreated Viking village at Höllviken, the exciting history of the Vikings is re-enacted as it was 900 years ago.

[Minimalist]

Advances in the technique continue.

Misleading headline on the article, though.

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/09/digitall...scripture/

Digitally unwrapped scroll reveals earliest Old Testament scripture

“Each fragment’s main structure, completely burned and crushed, had turned into chunks of charcoal that continued to disintegrate every time they were touched,” said the study.
So researchers used advanced digital scanning tools to “virtually unwrap” the scroll and see its contents, without ever touching it.
A micro–computed tomography (micro-CT) scan was able to pick up traces of metal in the ink.
“We were amazed at the quality of the images,” said Michael Segal, head of the School of Philosophy and Religions at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
“Much of the text is as readable, or close to as readable as actual unharmed Dead Sea Scrolls or high resolution photographs of them.”

Keep up the good work, boys.