

In search of Western civilisation's lost classics: a library buried in AD79 is slowly revealing its secrets - dood
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24096948-25132,00.html

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hugh
An interesting article, marred only by the occasional clangingly awful
sentence like these:

"I am looking at one of the Dead Sea scrolls of classical antiquity: a shard
of half-recovered time. It belongs, I realise, to a genre of accidental art
that speaks of our relationship to the past more precisely than any intact
work; it is the art of the fragment, an art that yields to us, but never
surrenders."

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swombat
_The excavators also found what they took to be chunks of coal deep inside the
villa, and set them alight to illuminate their passage underground. Only when
they noticed how many torches had solidified around an umbilicus -- a core of
wood or bone to which the roll was attached -- did the true nature of the find
become apparent. Here was a trove of ancient texts, carbonised by the heat
surge of the eruption._

Am I the only one whose blood curdled when I read that?

Typical... ancient texts, the only copy to survive from antiquity, perhaps...
what better thing could you do than set it alight!

~~~
Andys
Today's hard disks will probably become tomorrow's blunt instruments.

