Posted on 01/20/2015 12:10:59 PM PST by rdl6989
For the first time, words have been read from a burnt, rolled-up scroll buried by Mount Vesuvius in AD79.
The scrolls of Herculaneum, the only classical library still in existence, were blasted by volcanic gas hotter than 300C and are desperately fragile.
Deep inside one scroll, physicists distinguished the ink from the paper using a 3D X-ray imaging technique sometimes used in breast scans.
They believe that other scrolls could also be deciphered without unrolling.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
A mysterious text was decoded to read, “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.”
Angelina Jolie advised them to destroy the scrolls just to be safe.
Gaius Corpulus to Flatulus Maxius:
Greetings to you and to all in your household. To your wife and children I send my best wishes for health and prosperity. And I do beseech you to remind that mischievous Celtic slave girl to keep our little secret. I am confident you will not endeavor to enquire of her as to its nature.
My thoughts often turn to home and the superb wine pressed from the vineyards on the slopes of Vesuvius. And it is on the subject of Vesuvius that is the occasion for this epistle.
My travels in the East have introduced me to certain men of knowledge, and who claim that the superb soil of a region is sometimes associated with the past wrath of Vulcan displayed in a fury of fire, smoke and terrible destruction. They further informed that such incidents follow not long on the heels of great shaking of the ground as Vulcan himself hammers his forge closer and closer to those to whom he would bring harm.
You no doubt remember clearly the great shaking that destroyed much of Pompeii just two years before I was called to my first tour of duty in Cappadocia. And so I write urge that you and your family relocate to Rome or Capua without delay.
Whatever you do — don’t roll up this letter and stick it on the shelf.
Analysis is a painstaking job because the layers of paper are squashed and twisted
The scrolls are the only library known to have survived from classical times
The work was time-consuming and involved a lot of guesswork, particularly because the layers of paper were not just rolled, but squashed and mangled by their encounter with Vesuvius.Furthermore, the grid of papyrus fibres within the paper posed complications, because it disguised many of the letters' vertical and horizontal strokes. For this reason, letters with curved lines were easier to pick out.
Simply amazing! Having visited Herculaneum and Pompeii, and seen the total destruction, this technology will serve to open up some of the secrets lost when Vesuvius erupted.
I suppose to past generations that was a bit like pointing a box out to a kid and ordering, whatever you do, don't look in the box.
And your excuse for listing corn is...?
Hmmm????
It is pretty hard to imagine Italian cuisine before the tomato.
AD 79.
Imagine the discovery of New Testament writings predating anything now known, and written from first hand knowledge!
The discovery of the theater in Herculaneum also makes me a little ill — the idiot aristocrat used the find (and the theater was roofed, and the roof had survived, so the actual interior of the theater was basically a buried room, left as it had been 1900 years ago) as a gift shop, stripping it of all the statuary and shipping those off to peers and relatives throughout Europe.
Another great story — the excavators, who were risking their lives anyway, came across a wall with gold letters nailed to it, containing a message of some sort, probably a dedication from whomever had built the building. The excavators pried off all the letters and presented them to their boss, so the message (which is the only real value there) was lost. Work of genius.
;’)
It wouldn’t do much at all, because the current canonical version(s) is(are) the only one(s) that anyone would accept. Any older versions would be rejected as attacks on Christianity. There were a couple of “Secret Gospel of Mark” versions circulating in classical and post-classical times that were branded heretical, and wound up in the Vatican archives, the rest of the copies burned. Not sure the archive copies have survived to this day.
The ones that have been opened (and mostly destroyed) in the past proved to contain writings of Epicurean philosophers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philodemus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herculaneum_papyri
http://ancphil.lsa.umich.edu/-/downloads/papyri/JankoRecentDevelopments.pdf
Corn meant wheat before 1492. :’) Avocado, though...
And in Old English, “corn” meant little roundish thing — one OE poem mentions “corns of hail” (hence corned beef and a corn on the toe).
Thanks maryz!
http://www.bonappetit.com/test-kitchen/ingredients/article/the-etymology-of-the-word-corn
X-rays reveal words in Vesuvius-baked scrolls
http://www.nature.com/news/x-rays-reveal-words-in-vesuvius-baked-scrolls-1.16763
High-Tech Imaging Detects Letters in Carbonized Scroll
http://www.archaeology.org/news/2908-150120-herculaneum-papyri-imaging
Hard to say. In the days of the internet they couldn’t be as effectively suppressed.
They would eventually have a shot at being part of the canon.
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