Bibliopath ping.
Posted on 02/14/2005 7:42:21 AM PST by Mike Fieschko
A PHILANTHROPIST has stepped forward to fund excavations at the ancient city of Herculaneum in Italy, where scholars believe a Roman library lies buried beneath 90ft of lava from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79.David W Packard, whose family helped to found the Hewlett-Packard computer company, is concerned that the site may be poorly conserved or that excavation of the library may not continue unless he underwrites the work.
Herculaneum, south of present-day Naples, was buried by the same eruption that destroyed nearby Pompeii.
“It is hard to imagine anything more exciting than excavating at Herculaneum,” said Packard, who is channelling the money through a family institute. “We have spent around $2m (£1.1m) so far, much of it on conservation work. We have tried to work closely with the Italians, who have all the skills needed. But we can offer a degree of independence and financial security.”
There has been concern in academic circles that the already excavated parts of the Roman city are falling into disrepair and that there are no plans for excavating the Villa of the Papyri. The building, which contains the library, once belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law.
The villa is regarded as one of the most important unexcavated sites in Italy. Previous exploratory digs unearthed 1,800 charred manuscripts, many of them unknown or known only through references in other works.
The scrolls were in crates and it appears that slaves were removing them from the libraries when they were inundated with ash from the eruption. Although they appeared to be in a poor state, scientists at Oxford University have been able to read them after subjecting them to imaging techniques.
It is believed that there are thousands more scrolls in the building, much of which lies beneath the modern town of Ercolano, and that they may include lost works by Aristotle, Livy and Sappho.
“Of course everyone wants to excavate the villa,” said Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill of the British School at Rome, which is managing work on the site. “The building itself is of major historic importance, but the priority is conservation.”
Packard, a former classics scholar who lives in California, runs the Packard Humanities Institute, which supports archeological work in Bosnia, Albania and other countries. Though the institute has an endowment of £375m, Packard is not making an open-ended pledge to support work at the site. But he added: “If the proper circumstances develop, we can afford to do it. It is not a problem of having to go out and raise the money. There are no catches.”
He said there should be no conflict between those who want to excavate the villa immediately and those who argue in favour of conserving the whole site, generally acknowledged to be in a poor state of repair. “It would be irresponsible treasure hunting to dig the choice parts of the site and then leave afterwards,” he said.
Professor Robert Fowler of the Herculaneum Society, formed last year to support work at the site, said: “The work now being done by Mr Packard at Herculaneum is admirable and important.”
Ping
Very exciting. There are many ancient works which we know by name but which have never been found. It would be a great treat to find a play by Sophocles or a book by Aristotle. Or perhaps even something totally unsuspected. This is money well spent.
Any one consider possibly writings regarding Christ or His followers. Talk about shaking things up a bit.
http://www.packhum.org/phi-info.html
Here is a link to a web site on the Packard Hum Institute. Their projects sound fantastic, including the Founding Fathers and the Bach stuff. This is what a humanities foundation ought to do! Though the support of "human rights in emerging democracies" could be a bit troubling...that could be code for the left wing social agenda. Hard to say but the other stuff, including this dig, sound awesome.
All of Aristotle's 'popular' works (mainly the Dialogues) have been lost and are known only through references. It's an irony of history that what we have are all his unpublished treatises but none of the actual material widely read by the ancient world. I would bet money that his popular works will be found at the Villa of the Papyri, because no Roman library would've been complete without them. How exciting!
BTW, his foremost student Theophrastus was considered by the ancients to rival Aristotle and Plato in the breadth and novelty of his writings. None of his major works have survived to the present but in fragments and finding any of them would be no less exciting.
One of the travesties of both Pompeii and Herculaneum is the degradation of the already excavated areas. Those are threatened by exposure to the elements. Most are blocked off from public view because of the danger of collapse. I've always thought it would benefit all if portions of the already excavated areas were to be sealed off and covered in a material that would prevent further deterioration yet allow for easy excavation if needed in the future.
PS. Aristotle himself so admired Theophrastus' writing skill that he gave him that nickname, which means "divine speaker."
Considering the eruption occurred in 79 AD, it's doubtful that there is any reference to Christ in the documents. Most of the early Christian writings occurred after that.
Bibliopath ping.
This is such a tremendous find ... it's just mind-boggling how much classical scholarship could advance in the next 20 years, as these documents are conserved and translated. It's like the Roman equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Can you add Huber to the Bibliopath list?
I'm going to have to agree with that.
This is exciting news, IMO. Thousands of manuscripts are only known of by rumor or reference. There are quite probably hundreds of texts previously thought lost to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.
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Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
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Yep, that is correct. Aristotle's works were divided into the "exoteric" texts that were published and distributed by the Lyceum - it is these that are referred to by Cicero and many other famous commentators. All of them have been lost since Classical times.
What has survived are the "esoteric" writings that were basically lecture notes or rough drafts that were never designed or refined for a general audience. I don't recall the precise details of the story, but I believe that an editor at the Lyceum (perhaps Andronicus of Rhodes) had hidden away a cache of these works and they were rediscovered in the late Roman Empire. Somehow they ended up in the hands of Arab scholars who translated them so that they were reintroduced to the West in the Reconquista of Spain from the captured libraries of the Moors.
It would be a most excellent triumph to reclaim the exoteric works, not only of Aristotle but also of the other famous scholars of the Lyceum (nearly all survive only in fragments, if at all).
I wondered about the same thing. However by 79 AD there could have been much already written about Christ or the earliest roots of the Christian church since most of the Roman populace had heard of these by this time. at least on a colloquial basis..
Unless lava did not actually enter the library, wouldn't anything written on parchment been burnt to cinders? I guess if there are stone tables, there might be a potential find, but outside of that, I can't imagine anything written to have survived a lava flow.
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