Bibiliopath PING!
Bibiliopath PING!
I've heard of loosing a library book before, but the whole library? Wonder what the over-due fees are on that?
Just the tiniest fraction of what may be found.
So9
Might be some changes on the way in our history of philosophy.
Fingers crossed. It's hard to think of all those "lumps of coal" that were "unthinkingly" dumped into the sea. Let's hope they didn't include those lost treatises of Aristotle or additional plays by Sophocles and Aeschylus.
The article illustrates it well: we have only seven plays by Sophocles, including mighty pillars of Western culture like Oedipus Rex and Antigone. God only knows what might be in the missing 113 plays!
I think every classicist has their "if only we could find" list, and most of the stuff might potentially be in the Villa of the Papyri. I know one classicist who spent years trying to reconstruct what might have been in the Memoirs of Sulla. Actually finding and being able to read a copy would be stunning.
50 pounds is about $120? Maybe if we have some left from the tax refund, after we pay the charge bill and build the pergola ... I wonder whether they publish a magazine.
This deals with the foundation of the whole western tradition. I hope this dig gets done. Why isn't the government of Italy chipping in? It's their own history.
Although philosophy never saved a soul (no Jesus was not a philosopher), it is cool to imagine what was in the minds of thinking folks in those days.
It follows the first detailed analysis of the 1,800 papyri, now largely unrolled and deciphered thanks to a technique known as multi-spectral imaging (MSI). What appear to the naked eye as jet-black cinders are transformed by MSI into readable text. Thirty thousand images are now legible on CD-Rom; suddenly poems and works of philosophy are speaking again, 2,000 years after they were sealed in their cedar-wood cabinets in the summer of AD79.
Dangit!
I hate it when they do that.
Arrange it so that one can't download and save the entire article, just print it. That is unkind to trees and very inefficient.
Plus it wasted hours of people's time when one is determined to preserve the entire article.
The above paragraph is very interesting, in that not only have translations been made, but they are available to someone on CD ROM. The following may be of further value in that regard:
Membership of the Herculaneum Society costs £50 per year. Contact: Friends of the Herculaneum Society, Classics Centre, Old Boys’ School, George Street, Oxford 0X1 2RL.
Website: www.herculaneum.ox.ac.uk
e-mail: herculaneum@classics.ox.ac.uk
ping & bump.
This could be a great boon for the humanities if that's the case. It would be too much to say that it would bring a new renaissance, but if really important works are found that will give writers and critics and theatrical companies something to do for decades, though it might put out some professors who chose the classics because nothing changes there.
Do you suppose 2,000 years from now scholars will be excavating the Clinton Library?
Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on, off, or alter the "Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list --
Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
The GGG Digest -- Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)
This 79AD event is recorded in the tree-rings worldwide.
Fascinating. I hope they work fast and go ahead and excavate. It sounds like Vesuvius is on a 2,000 year timetable and the last explosion was 79AD...
