
Ancient Scrolls Blackened by Vesuvius Are Readable at Last - Vigier
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ancient-scrolls-blackened-vesuvius-are-readable-last-herculaneum-papyri-180953950/
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bobbles
Wow this is crazy, they're reading the _rolled_ scrolls, compensating for the
layers, curvature, etc. (not to mention the.. you know.. volcano.. damage)

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stavrogin
Here is the announcement from the research team (in French, 2015-01-20), with
one more photo and a 3D video of the scroll. (fr)
[http://www2.cnrs.fr/presse/communique/3871.htm](http://www2.cnrs.fr/presse/communique/3871.htm)

The French mainstream media had many articles on this, notably Le Monde, with
added pictures, see (fr)
[http://www.lemonde.fr/sciences/article/2015/01/20/des-
papyru...](http://www.lemonde.fr/sciences/article/2015/01/20/des-papyrus-
antiques-carbonises-dechiffres-a-la-lumiere-des-rayons-x_4559918_1650684.html)

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userbinator
Data recovery from nearly 2000-year-old damaged media.

I wonder if we'd be as successful with trashed storage devices today, 2000
years from now.

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ajuc
I doubt it.

Text on paper is much more redundant medium, and has much smaller information
density.

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kristopolous
I've had this weird theory that generally, the more sophisticated the record
keeping technology, the less the shelf-life. If I was to do this writing in
clay tablets for instance versus paper versus the fragile digital tech we have
now.

If this is true, then the corollary is that given say, some ancient
civilization of say 3,500 years ago - perhaps the more sophisticated ones used
record keeping technology that would become total dust a mere 2,000 year ago -
while the less sophisticated ones have records which have survived.

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pjmlp
I love reading such old documents specially in what concerns the available
technology and ways of society back then.

Regarding your statement, maybe Atlantis was such a case. :)

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wazoox
Roman scrolls as old as these being extremely rare, this could alter
significantly our understanding of ancient texts and their transmission across
centuries.

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gadders
I hope they find some works that were mentioned in antiquity but are lost to
us now. EG Some of this list:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_work#Classical_world](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_work#Classical_world)

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sramsay
Some of those would be absolutely staggering. Epicureanism and Stoicism, for
example, were among the most popular philosophies of the ancient world, but
our written record of them is extremely fragmentary relative to what we know
was written.

Same goes for drama. Discovering _any_ additional ancient play would be
completely staggering. We possess only one complete trilogy (Aeschylus'
_Oresteia_ ) and only one complete satyr play -- an important genre, since it
may represent a holdover from earlier forms of the worship of Dionysius that
led to what we think of as ancient drama.

It's an awfully good time to be a classicist!

~~~
gadders
Whilst googling this topic, I read that there is a missing first book from
Homer called Margites. Imagine finding that?

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rwl4
This is wonderful to read. I really sincerely hope this technology can open up
hundreds of more scrolls to be read. It grieves me to think of how much
knowledge has been lost due to scribes not getting around to copying texts.

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gloriousduke
If existence is deterministic in a Laplaceanly demonic way, we should be able
to unravel etiology more and more effectively as our technology improves.
Perhaps this is a harbinger of the possibilities of the forensics of ontology.

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robin_reala
…and for laypeople?

~~~
gjm11
_Laplaceanly demonic_ : see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace%27s_demon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace%27s_demon).
Laplace's demon was a hypothetical being able to see the entire present state
of the universe and extrapolate the future from it. (Laplace himself never
called it a "demon".)

 _etiology_ : causation; how things got how they are.

 _harbinger_ : forerunner; advance warning. (The etymology is interesting.
Originally a harbinger was someone who provides accommodation -- compare the
French word "auberge". Then it came to mean someone sent ahead by, e.g., an
army to prepare lodgings so that the troops would have somewhere to sleep when
they arrived. And then, metaphorically, it came to mean any sort of
forerunner.

 _forensics_ : = forensic science, meaning the application of science to
answering the sorts of questions that come up in criminal trials. (Same origin
as "forum"; in ancient Rome trials took place in the public square.) I think
gloriousduke really just means something like "scientific investigation into
past events" here.

 _ontology_ : actually means the study of what exists. (I.e., answering
questions like "what kinds of things exist?".) I suspect _gloriousduke_ meant
something else, perhaps something as mundane as "the study of actual things
that exist". In any case, his second sentence doesn't really add anything much
to the first.

So I would translate gloriousduke's comment as follows. "If the universe is
deterministic, like a big mechanical machine, then with better and better
technology we will be able to do better and better at deciphering the past
from its present remains: this thing with the scrolls is just the beginning.
Also, I know some long words."

(Note that actually determinism isn't quite the issue. What matters is what
you might call "backward determinism", where you extrapolate the future from
the past. But it looks as if the laws of nature are kinda reversible, so the
two are closely related.)

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mcherm
Thank you for giving us this splendid translation and analysis! The original
comment was not worthy of the attention you lavished on it.

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fit2rule
Heh. And here I am trying to work out how I'll get the data off a stack of
5.4" floppies I just found in my own personal archives. Wish I had access to a
particle accelerator and some scientists right now ..

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jacquesm
I doubt a particle accelerator would be of much use but with some clever
scanning using a GMR head from an old harddrive and some analog trickery to
amplify the signal and a couple of geared down stepper motors you might be
able to build up a picture of the magnetic fields on the floppy without
contacting it at all. Those heads are designed to track patterns _much_
smaller than those on a floppy so you should be able to piece together the
lines of the scan.

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Keyframe
This is an extraordinary news. History surrounding those scrolls (after
unearthed) is as interesting, if not more, than what probably lies in the
scrolls themselves.

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ryan_j_naughton
The history surrounding the scrolls is undoubtedly interesting, but I would
argue it is much less interesting or valuable than the content of the scrolls
themselves.

The reason is that the volume of text from the ancient Greco-Roman world was
orders of magnitude larger than the surviving texts. To put it in perspective,
the library of Alexandria likely had 500K scrolls [1]. In contrast, the Loeb
Classical Library from Harvard (which is generally considered one of the most
complete collections of surviving texts) "can all fit in a bookcase or
two"[2]. Given that the Loeb texts contain both the original and translations,
the volume of surviving texts would fit in even less space if it was only in
the original Greek or Latin.

Thus, we can surmise that we have less than 1/2 of 1% of all the works from
the Library of Alexandria. Therefore, there is a very good chance that some of
the scrolls from the Herculaneum library will be new texts.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria)
[2]
[http://www.hup.harvard.edu/collection.php?cpk=1031](http://www.hup.harvard.edu/collection.php?cpk=1031)

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Keyframe
Of course that possible new discovery would be more interesting, what are the
chances though? Since I'm in film/animation backgorund I am rooting for a
possible recovery of a lost Sophocles play :)

From what I remember (it's been awhile), wasn't the villa that scrolls were
found in not completely unearthed - with a possibility of more scrolls inside?
I think, from what I remember, that these 1800 or so were found in a crate (in
a part of said villa) people were trying to rescue while Vesuvius was doing
its thing, leaving the possibility of more crates or even a full library still
buried. Getty, I think, build a replica of that villa in Malibu.

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sophacles
Would it help if I started back on my writing career? I mean, the tech world
is just so interesting...

(sorry, couldn't help it, it's Friday :) )

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Keyframe
Sure! Just tone down the incest in further stories about Oedipus and the gang
and you're set!

