cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/3194334
Scrolls count as books, right?
They’ve managed to find actual words in a two-thousand year-old, burned scrolls from Herculaneum.
The exciting bit? The words they’ve read so far appear to be from a previously unknown ancient text. And there are over six hundred other scrolls. If we can read more of them, we’ll find lost texts. Maybe some we’ve heard of, maybe some we haven’t. Either would be amazing!
From the article:
The Herculaneum papyri, ancient scrolls housed in the library of a private villa near Pompeii, were buried and carbonized by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. For almost 2,000 years, this lone surviving library from antiquity was buried underground under 20 meters of volcanic mud. In the 1700s, they were excavated, and while they were in some ways preserved by the eruption, they were so fragile that they would turn to dust if mishandled. How do you read a scroll you can’t open? For hundreds of years, this question went unanswered.
This is amazing. I think there are some Dead Sea scrolls that were to delicate to open as well that might be able to use some of these techniques?
I was thinking that, too. These can’t be the only ‘unreadable’ ancient scrolls. We might be on our way to uncovering a huge number of previously lost texts!