Scrolls That Survived Vesuvius Divulge Their First Word

Experts hope that the techniques used to retrieve hidden text on delicate papyrus could lead to the recovery of lost classic works.

A cache of some 800 scrolls was discovered in 1752 by workers excavating the villa. Scholars who tried to unroll them stopped after finding that their methods destroyed the scrolls while yielding very little text. None has been opened since the 19th century.

The new approach used to read the scrolls has been developed over the past 20 years by Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky. It uses computer tomography, the same technique as in CT scans, plus advancements in artificial intelligence.

Most of the excavated scrolls come from a single room that seems to have contained the personal library of Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher employed by Piso, the villa’s owner. Many scholars think that Piso himself would have had a general library containing major Latin and Greek works, and that this library has yet to be found in the villa’s many unexcavated rooms.

A vast majority of ancient Latin and Greek texts have been lost. Sophocles wrote more than 120 plays, of which only seven have wholly survived. Just 35 books of Livy’s 142-volume history of Rome are known to exist. Almost all the poems of Sappho have vanished. Retrieving an entire classical library would vastly expand knowledge of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds.

“Recovering such a library would transform our knowledge of the ancient world in ways we can hardly imagine,” Dr. Fowler said. “The impact could be as great as the rediscovery of manuscripts during the Renaissance.”


Scrolls That Survived Vesuvius Divulge Their First Word