of ancient scrolls from Pompeii (neighboring Herculaneum to be exact). From The New Yorker:
The Invisible Library
It was a warm day in Paris, and the library of the Institut de France was stuffy and hot. Daniel Delattre, a distinguished French papyrologist, did not remove his suit jacket. The institute, which includes the Académie Française, is a jacket-and-tie sort of place.
Delattre, who is sixty-eight years old and has a dreamy, lost-in-the-vale-of-academe manner, was contemplating a small wooden box on the table in front of him which was labeled “Objet Un.” There are thousands of rare objects in the institute’s library; the fact that whatever was inside the box was Object One suggested that it was of some importance. An ornately hand-lettered card was taped to the outside. It said, in French, “Box containing the remains of papyrus from Herculaneum”—the Roman town destroyed, along with its larger neighbor, Pompeii, in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79.
What they could represent:
Given the splendor of the villa, and the masterly bronze sculptures found in its ruins, the learned world assumed that the library would contain vanished classics. One could dare hope for one or two of the lost histories of Livy, of whose hundred and forty-two books on the history of Rome only thirty-five survive. Or perhaps one of the nine volumes of verse written by Sappho, the Greek poet; only one complete poem remains. By some estimates, ninety-nine per cent of ancient Greek literature has been lost, and Latin has not fared much better. Among those works we know are missing are Aristotle’s second volume of the Poetics, which was on comedy; Gorgias’ philosophical work “On Non-Existence”; the four missing books of the Roman historian Tacitus’ Annals, covering Caligula’s reign and the beginning of Claudius’; Ovid’s version of “Medea”; and Suetonius on the Greek athletic games. (His “Lives of Famous Whores” also, sadly, has not survived.) Greek tragedy has been decimated. According to the Suda, the tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia of classical culture, Euripides wrote as many as ninety-two plays; eighteen survive. We have seven each from Aeschylus and Sophocles, who wrote about ninety and a hundred and twenty, respectively. “And that’s just the big three of tragedy,” the writer and classics professor Daniel Mendelsohn told me. “Of the thousand that were likely written and performed during the hundred-year heyday of tragedy, we have only thirty-three extant plays—that’s about a three-per-cent survival rate.”
Unfortunately, the very thing that preserved them - driving all the moisture out with the heat of the eruption - made them so fragile as to fall into hundreds of pieces when any attempt was made to open and read them. X-Ray imaging to the rescue:
Much more at the New Yorker article - the original paper can be found here at Nature: Revealing letters in rolled Herculaneum papyri by X-ray phase-contrast imaging
Very cool use of technology and I can see this technique advancing at a rapid pace in the next ten years. What else is out there to be discovered?
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