Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Herculaneum Papyri

Episode Date: July 13, 2024

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. Sponsors Available nationally, look for a bottle of Heaven Hill Bottled-in-Bond at your local store. Find out more at heavenhilldistillery.com/hh-bottled-in-bond.php Sign up today at butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily to choose your free offer and get $20 off. Visit BetterHelp.com/everywhere today to get 10% off your first month. Use the code EverythingEverywhere for a 20% discount on a subscription at Newspapers.com. Visit meminto.com and get 15% off with code EED15.  Listen to Expedition Unknown wherever you get your podcasts.  Get started with a $13 trial set for just $3 at harrys.com/EVERYTHING. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Ben Long & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 about 1,800 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 finally have arrived. Learn more about the Herculaneum papyri and the attempts to read and preserve their ancient knowledge on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

It effectively turned day and tonight. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us. every week on the Thuline podcast from NPR. There are several different aspects to this story, but before I get into anything, I should explain what exactly 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 previously done an episode on Pompeii, so I'm not going to repeat what happened there, but suffice it to say that 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 a volcano. You can't outrun it, and you cannot 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 the 7th, who also happened to be King Charles III of Spain, employed workmen who discovered a villa while conducting excavations at Herculaneum. Ethel Ross Baker explained it best in her 1908 book Buried Herculaneum, quote, The large number of papyri after being buried 18 centuries had 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 papyriary were found at a depth of about 120 feet or 37 meters. End quote. The excavations at that time were not the careful digs that can be seen at modern archaeological sites. It was extremely rough and many scrolls were damaged. Further excavations were conducted in 1828 and by 1855 almost all of the current known scrolls had been found. As of today, there are 1,826 scrolls that have been discovered. 340 are believed to be complete or near complete, 790 are primarily complete but partially decayed, and 500 are nothing but fragments. I I should note that these scrolls do not look like scrolls. If you ever see a photo of one, it basically looks like a burnt log.

They're black and charred, and it comes as no surprise that the first people who discovered them thought nothing of their findings. The takeaway from all this is that while they were able to eventually identify them as scrolls because they could see some 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, usually from gifts that were given out in the 19th century.

The villa of the papyrii, named after the scrolls that were found there, was believed to have been originally built by Lucius, Calpurnius, Pizzo, Sezonius, 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 metal level. The great big question of, how do we know what we know about the end? ancient world. The harsh reality is that what we know about the ancient world has been pieced together from surviving texts and archaeology. The truth is, there are very few examples of original writing on papyrus or parchment that have ever been found anywhere. The Dead Sea Scrolls are some of the oldest, and 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 completely disappeared. There are many texts that we know existed because they're referenced in surviving texts, but we don't have any of the originals. Given how much we don't have from ancient Rome, we know a lot more about Rome than most other 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 absolutely no clue what they're 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. And this is what we, we just don't know. And this is what makes the Herculaneum papyri so compelling. Here we have almost 2,000 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 other works, and some might be wholly original texts that we never even knew existed. And what's 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 may be difficult to ever get back there again. Now I want to move back to the 20th and 21st centuries. One of the smartest things that 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 Herculanian papyri. There were attempts to try 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 would solve the problem. And that was the right decision. One of the techniques that began being used in the late 1990s was conducted on scrolls where unrolling attempts had already 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. And this technique revealed previously invisible writing on many of the 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 1,0,0,000-2,000-9 meter wavelengths. Researchers have been able to decipher what was on several scrolls using this method. They found philosophical works by the Epicurean philosopher Philidamus of Giddara and a poem about the Battle of Actium.

While this technique was a huge step forward, there was still 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 writings on each side of the paper. So how do you go about getting text from a carbonized 2,000-year-old scroll that cannot be unwound and might have writing on both sides of the tightly wound surface? The answer is to unroll the scroll virtually. And 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 that you're 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 different absorption levels in the body between bone and flesh. 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 a scroll. Researchers took a full volumetric scan of four scrolls creating a 3D model of the rolled scroll. That part, while technically sophisticated,

was actually relatively easy. The real hard part was to virtually unroll the 3D model that they had created, and then to analyze the virtually unrolled script and try to 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 of 2023. They put up a 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 of 2023, 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 to be claimed. A team of three from Germany, Switzerland, and the exact same student, Luke Ferretor from the University of Nebraska, claim the prize by deciphering 5% of one of the scrolls. The scroll appears to be a previously unknown work from the previously mentioned Philidamus. The winning team used a form of artificial intelligence to read the text on the scroll.

5% is fine for a proof of concept, but it's a far cry from a full transcription of the scrolls. And that is why the team behind the Vesuvius Challenge has announced a new challenge for 2024. This time there are several more 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 who do what the 2023 prize winners did in less time and more efficiently, as well as prizes for finding the titles of the scrolls. The sheer number of scrolls that could be read using this technique is enormous, and it has allowed the potential to vastly expand our knowledge of ancient,

Rome and or Greece. They may find new philosophical treaties 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 a new material that's come to light. For this episode, I am a hundred percent 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 the new information will be, but I'm sure that there will absolutely be some sort of update. The Herculaneum papyrii are a fascinating mix of the ancient and the modern. Despite having been written over 2,000 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.

The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiever. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers. Your support helps me put out a show every single day. And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere daily merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters. If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the Completionist

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