Ancient Scrolls Blackened by Vesuvius Are Readable at Last

[kaine123]

[QUOTE][IMG]http://thumbs.media.smithsonianmag.com//filer/d7/d5/d7d527b1-acd5-4d50-a729-6241f4d75f32/scoll-close.jpg__800x600_q85_crop.jpg[/IMG]
[I]A closeup of a Herculaneum papyrus scroll used in an international scanning project. (E. Brun)[/I][/QUOTE]

[QUOTE][B]X-ray scans can just tease out letters on the warped documents from a library at Herculaneum[/B][/QUOTE]

[QUOTE]The lavish villa sat overlooking the Bay of Naples, offering bright ocean views to the well-heeled Romans who came from across the empire to study. The estate's library was stocked with texts by prominent thinkers of the day, in particular a wealth of volumes by the philosopher Philodemus, an instructor of the poet Virgil.

But the seaside library also sat in the shadow of a volcano that was about to make terrible history.

The 79 A.D. eruption of Mount Vesuvius is most famous for burying Pompeii, spectacularly preserving many artifacts—and residents—in that once bustling town south of Naples. The tumbling clouds of ash also entombed the nearby resort of Herculaneum, which is filled with its own wonders. During excavations there in 1752, diggers found a villa containing bundles of rolled scrolls, carbonized by the intense heat of the pyroclastic flows and preserved under layers of cement-like rock. Further digs showed that the scrolls were part of an extensive library, earning the structure the name Villa of the Papyri.

Blackened and warped by the volcanic event, the roughly 1,800 scrolls found so far have been a challenge to read. Some could be mechanically unrolled, but hundreds remain too fragile to make the attempt, looking like nothing more than clubs of charcoal. Now, more than 200 years later, archaeologists examining two of the scrolls have found a way to peer inside them with x-rays and read text that has been lost since antiquity.

"Anybody who focuses on the ancient world is always going to be excited to get even one paragraph, one chapter, more," says Roger Macfarlane, a classicist at Brigham Young University in Utah. "The prospect of getting hundreds of books more is staggering."[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE][video=youtube;JlWJ68DJGM0]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlWJ68DJGM0[/video][/QUOTE]

[QUOTE]Most of the scrolls that have been unwrapped so far are Epicurean philosophical texts written by Philodemus—prose and poetry that had been lost to modern scholars until the library was found. Epicurus was a Greek philosopher who developed a school of thought in the third century B.C. that promoted pleasure as the main goal of life, but in the form of living modestly, foregoing fear of the afterlife and learning about the natural world. Born in the first century B.C. in what is now Jordan, Philodemus studied at the Epicurean school in Athens and became a prominent teacher and interpreter of the philosopher's ideas.

Modern scholars debate whether the scrolls were part of Philodemus' personal collection dating to his time period, or whether they were mostly copies made in the first century A.D. Figuring out their exact origins will be no small feat—in addition to the volcano, mechanical or chemical techniques for opening the scrolls did their share of damage, sometimes breaking the delicate objects into fragments or destroying them outright. And once a page was unveiled, readability suffered.

"Ironically, when someone opened up a scroll, they would write on a separate sheet what they could read, like a facsimile, and the original ink, once exposed to air, would start to fade," says Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky who specializes in digital imaging. What's more, the brute-force techniques usually left some pages stuck together, trapping hidden layers and their precious contents.

From 2007 to 2012, Seales collaborated with Daniel Delattre at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Paris on a project to scan scrolls in the collections of the Institut de France—former treasures of Napoleon Bonaparte, who received them as a gift from the King of Naples in 1802. Micro-CT scans of two rolled scrolls revealed their interior structure—a mass of delicate whorls akin to a fingerprint. From that data the team estimated that the scrolls would be between 36 and 49 feet long if they could be fully unwound. But those scans weren't sensitive enough to detect any lettering.

The trouble is that papyri at the time were written using a carbon-based ink, making it especially hard to digitally tease out the words on the carbonized scrolls. Traditional methods like CT scans blast a target with x-rays and look for patterns created as different materials absorb the radiation—this works very well when scanning for dense bone inside soft tissue (or for peering inside a famous violin), but the method fails at discerning carbon ink on blackened scrolls.[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE][IMG]http://public.media.smithsonianmag.com//filer/b6/15/b615359c-163b-4fd3-b183-aa160c40ba27/scroll-whole.jpg[/IMG]
[I]A rolled scroll from Herculaneum, once a gift to Napoleon. (D. Delattre © Bibliothèque de l'Institut de France)[/I][/QUOTE]

[QUOTE]Now a team led by Vito Mocella of the Italian National Research Council has shown for the first time that it is possible to see letters in rolled scrolls using a twist on CT scanning called x-ray phase-contrast tomography, or XPCT. Mocella, Delattre and their colleagues obtained permission to take a fragment from an opened scroll and a whole rolled scroll from the Paris institute to the European Synchrotron in Grenoble. The particle collider was able to produce the high-energy beam of x-rays needed for the scans.

Rather than looking for absorption patterns, XPCT captures changes in the phase of the x-rays. The waves of x-rays move at different speeds as they pass through materials of various density. In medical imaging, rays moving through an air-filled organ like a lung travel faster then those penetrating thick muscle, creating contrast in the resulting images. Crucially, the carbon-based ink on the scrolls didn't soak into the papyrus—it sits on top of the fibers. The microscopic relief of a letter on the page proved to be just enough to create a noticeable phase contrast.

Reporting today in the journal Nature Communications, Mocella and his team show that they were able to make out two previously unreadable sequences of capital letters from a hidden layer of the unrolled scroll fragment. The team interprets them as Greek words: ΠΙΠΤΟΙΕ, meaning "would fall", and ΕΙΠΟΙ, meaning "would say". Even more exciting for scholars, the team was able to pick out writing on the still-rolled scroll, eventually finding all 24 letters of the Greek alphabet at various points on the tightly bundled document. [/QUOTE]

[QUOTE][IMG]http://public.media.smithsonianmag.com//filer/0e/4e/0e4e8ee0-80b4-4191-a801-a00366411da6/scroll-alphabet.jpg[/IMG]
[I]The 24 letters of the Greek alphabet could be read inside the rolled scroll via the phase-contrast technique. (Mocella et al., Nature Communications)[/I][/QUOTE]

[QUOTE]Even though the current scans are mostly a proof of concept, the work suggests that there will soon be a way to read the full works on the rolled scrolls, the team says. "We plan to improve the technique," says Mocella. "Next spring we have an allowance to spend more time at the Grenoble synchrotron, where we can test a number of approaches and try to discern the exact chemical composition of the ink. That will help us improve the energy setting of the beam for our scan."

"With the text now accessible by virtue of specialized images, we have the prospect of going inside the rolled scrolls, and that's really exciting," says Macfarlane. Seales agrees: "Their work is absolutely crucial, and I am delighted to see a way forward using phase contrast."

Seales is currently working on ways to help make sense of future scans. With support from the National Science Foundation and Google, Seales is developing software that can sort through the jumbled letters and figure out where they belong on the scroll. The program should be able to lump letters into words and fit words into passages. "It turns out there are grains of sand sprinkled all the way through the scrolls," says Seales. "You can see them twinkling in the scans, and that constellation is fixed." Using the sand grains like guide stars, the finished software should be able to orient the letters on the whorled pages and line up multiple scans to verify the imagery.

The projects offer hope for further excavations of the Herculaneum library. "They stopped excavating at some point for various reasons, and one was, Why should we keep pulling things out if they are so hard to read?" says Seales. But many believe there is a lower "wing" of the villa's collection still buried, and it may contain more 1st-century Latin texts, perhaps even early Christian writings that would offer new clues to Biblical times.

"Statistically speaking, if you open up a new scroll of papyrus from Herculaneum, it's most likely going to be a text from Philodemus," says MacFarlane. "But I'm more interested in the Latin ones, so I would not be unhappy at all to get more Latin texts that are not all banged up."

For Mocella, being able to read even one more scroll is crucial for understanding the library and the workings of a classical school of philosophy. "Regardless of the individual text, the library is a unique cultural treasure, as it is the only ancient library to survive almost entire together with its books," he says. "It is the library as whole that confers the status of exceptionality."[/QUOTE]

[url]http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ancient-scrolls-blackened-vesuvius-are-readable-last-herculaneum-papyri-180953950/?[/url]

[Deathtrooper2]

Well wonder if the Scrolls are full of porno and other bestiality shit that they found before in Pompeii.

Seriously go look up erotica in Pompeii.

[Cypher_09]

Garry was here Ash is a loser

[Rainhorror]

[IMG]https://dl-web.dropbox.com/get/urafagt.png?_subject_uid=339033611&w=AABY7y8AXFDr-hIglUuHkNdIAVS_rtDM2FtfX4L4a3f0-Q[/IMG]

How stunning

[helifreak]

Take that Vesuvius, science 1 volcanoes 0.

[ironman17]

[QUOTE=Deathtrooper2;46976740]Well wonder if the Scrolls are full of porno and other bestiality shit that they found before in Pompeii.

Seriously go look up erotica in Pompeii.[/QUOTE]
Ah yes, I have heard of such things, including that one sculpture of Pan fucking a goat. Also apparently prostitution was pretty damn prominent and cheap in Pompeii and Herculaneum (prudish types would say the towns were rife with debauchery), and according to a piece of ancient Pompeian graffiti [I]"If anyone is looking for some tender love in this town, keep in mind that here all the girls are very friendly"[/I]. Or so he said.

But beyond the Pan X Goat artpiece, I haven't heard of much else in the way of the Pompeian bestiality thing, though I wouldn't put it past them. After all, this [U]is[/U] Classical Antiquity we're talking about.

[Zakk]

"Drink more ovaltine"

[ironman17]

"Be sure to chug more of Bacchus' Special Reserve! Whether by the cup or the amphora, it's truly divine!"

[Lonestriper]

I really want to believe it contains all the missing books of Livy and other cool shit but I just know it'll be tedious Epicurean tracts

[smug.gif]

[QUOTE][T]http://public.media.smithsonianmag.com//filer/b6/15/b615359c-163b-4fd3-b183-aa160c40ba27/scroll-whole.jpg[/T][/QUOTE]

Looks like something from Bad Dragon

[cecilbdemodded]

[quote]Epicurus was a Greek philosopher who developed a school of thought in the third century B.C. that promoted pleasure as the main goal of life, but in the form of living modestly[/quote]

I'm sure that scroll will have a note saying "You're doing it wrong".

[bigdan]

Looks like the turd i did this morning.

[ironman17]

[QUOTE=smug.gif;46977010]Looks like something from Bad Dragon[/QUOTE]
I wonder if folks in the Mediterranean Classical Era would have actually crafted animalistic dongs? I mean, with the way they were and how a lot of things weren't as "taboo" as they are today, I don't think it would be too implausible for some manic artisans to craft such things out of stone or bronze or even fired clay.

I mean, centuries before Pompeii was buried, the Mediterranean had the Antikythera clock and Atlantean brass, so it wouldn't be too much to wonder what other wondrous things the populace of the Mediterranean civilisations would have made that we have yet to discover.

[Zambies!]

"Dick butt lol"

Professor Jenkins turns to the camera as a single tear rolls down his cheek

[itak365]

[QUOTE=Deathtrooper2;46976740]Well wonder if the Scrolls are full of porno and other bestiality shit that they found before in Pompeii.

Seriously go look up erotica in Pompeii.[/QUOTE]

[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_16[/url] THis is probably the first diss in history.

pēdīcābo ĕgŏ uōs ĕt īrrŭmābō
Aūrĕlī păthĭce ēt cĭnaēdĕ Fūrī.
quī me ēx uērsĭcŭlīs mĕīs pŭtāstīs
quōd sūnt mōllĭcŭlī părūm pŭdīcŭm.
nām cāstum ēssĕ dĕcēt pĭūm pŏētăm
īpsūm. uērsĭcŭlōs nĭhīl nĕcēssĕ est.
quī tūm dēnĭque hăbēnt sălem āc lĕpōrĕm.
sī sīnt mōllĭcŭli āc părūm pŭdīcī.
ēt quōd prūrĭăt īncĭtārĕ pōssĭnt.
nōn dīcō pŭĕrīs sĕd hīs pĭlōsōs
quī dūrōs nĕquĕūnt mŏuērĕ lūmbōs.
uōs quōd mīlĭă mūltă bāsĭōrŭm
lēgīstīs mălĕ mē mărēm pŭtātĭs.
pēdīcābo ĕgŏ uōs ĕt īrrŭmābō.

In English:
I will sodomize you and face-fuck you,
bottom Aurelius and catamite Furius,
you who think, because my poems
are sensitive, that I have no shame.
For it's proper for a devoted poet to be moral
himself, [but] in no way is it necessary for his poems.
In point of fact, these have wit and charm,
if they are sensitive and a little shameless,
and can arouse an itch,
and I don't mean in boys, but in those hairy old men
who can't get it up.
Because you've read my countless kisses,
you think less of me as a man?
I will sodomize you and face-fuck you.

*drops scroll.*

[IMG]https://mnorth52.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/tumblr_lyd6j79goh1qfsl3b.png[/IMG]

[editline]20th January 2015[/editline]

[QUOTE=ironman17;46977196]I wonder if folks in the Mediterranean Classical Era would have actually crafted animalistic dongs? I mean, with the way they were and how a lot of things weren't as "taboo" as they are today, I don't think it would be too implausible for some manic artisans to craft such things out of stone or bronze or even fired clay.

I mean, centuries before Pompeii was buried, the Mediterranean had the Antikythera clock and Atlantean brass, so it wouldn't be too much to wonder what other wondrous things the populace of the Mediterranean civilisations would have made that we have yet to discover.[/QUOTE]

Phalluses became more of a taboo in the Middle Ages, phallic imagery was pretty common place in places you wouldn't really expect. The erotic connotations were a big no-no in Christian Europe, so even though it shows up in art, dicks are much less understated from that point onward.

[highlight](User was banned for this post ("image macro" - Orkel))[/highlight]

[ironman17]

Kinda makes you wonder how our world would have turned out if there was no "Fall of Rome", and the social mores and technological wonders of that time didn't fade from European culture as a whole?

[IlluminatiRex]

[QUOTE=itak365;46977430]
Phalluses became more of a taboo in the Middle Ages, phallic imagery was pretty common place in places you wouldn't really expect. The erotic connotations were a big no-no in Christian Europe, so even though it shows up in art, dicks are much less understated from that point onward.[/QUOTE]
Like on Herma.

[t]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/Herma_Demosthenes_Glyptothek_Munich_292.jpg[/t]

These would be all over the place.

[Telecaster]

It says "ur a faget"

[itak365]

[QUOTE=ironman17;46977492]Kinda makes you wonder how our world would have turned out if there was no "Fall of Rome", and the social mores and technological wonders of that time didn't fade from European culture as a whole?[/QUOTE]

Honestly, the advent of Christianity was the point when the decline of the Roman Empire would be inevitable. In addition to the increasingly unstable social and military situation on its extremely wide borders, it was becoming too bureaucratic for its own good, corruption was high, and it could barely afford to keep their public works in order. Armies weren't getting paid on time, Britain was abandoned entirely (cutting them off from some decent resources because they simply couldn't afford to guard it), and civil unrest was pretty high. "Barbarian" armies that had far better tactics and commanders were finally gaining superiority over the Roman military, which by this point was outdated, underfunded and undermanned.

Christianity essentially was a sort of counter-culture to the institutionalized paganism ("Give back to Caesar what is Caesar's, but give back to God what is God's") because of the way it challenged ideas of divine authority at the time.

For Rome to have survived, it would have needed to undergo serious socially progressive changes which would have been unheard of at the time, major economic sacrifices and it still would have probably become very, very tiny in spite of this.

[A Beaver]

[QUOTE] that promoted pleasure as the main goal of life, but in the form of living modestly, foregoing fear of the afterlife and learning about the natural world.[/QUOTE]

Sounds euphoric as fuck.

[Zero-Point]

"Professor, what does it say?"
"Let's see now...:
[del]Bread[/del]
[del]Eggs[/del]
Volcano Insurance
Goats Milk..."

[ithon]

this is one of my dreams come true.

[LMB10]

'There's a fucking volcano going -'

[lazyguy]

[QUOTE=Cypher_09;46976754]Garry was here Ash is a loser[/QUOTE]

Ash got the last laugh.

[The mouse]

I really hope there's some potential here for recovering some of the lost books of the ancient world. There's so much that we don't know or was lost over time, as was mentioned above even if we could find a lost book of Livy or Polybius it might give us a whole new perspective on an era of history.

[cliff2]

[QUOTE=Deathtrooper2;46976740]Well wonder if the Scrolls are full of porno and other bestiality shit that they found before in Pompeii.

Seriously go look up erotica in Pompeii.[/QUOTE]

[url]http://www.pompeiana.org/resources/ancient/graffiti%20from%20pompeii.htm[/url]
:v:

[Jalli]

[QUOTE=LMB10;46980128]'There's a fucking volcano going -'[/QUOTE]

in the castle of aaaaaarggh...