There were no official publications concerning the papyri till forty years after their discovery, and our information is of necessity incomplete, inexact and contradictory.įather Antonio Piaggio's machine. Weber, the engineer, and Paderni, the keeper of the Museum at Portici, were not experts in palaeography and philology, which sciences were, indeed, almost in their infancy one hundred and fifty years ago. No one knew how to deal with such strange material. Of these, 341 were found almost entire, 500 were merely charred fragments, and the remaining 965 were in every intermediate state of disintegration. Including every tiny fragment found, the catalogues give 1756 manuscripts discovered up to 1855, while subsequent discoveries bring the total up to 1806. The numbers given here exclude mere fragments. Nothing of any importance was discovered after this date. In the spring and summer of the following year, 337 Greek papyri and 18 Latin papyri were found in the Library. In the spring of 1753, 11 papyri were found in a room just south of the tablinum, and in the summer of the same year, 250 were found in a room to the north. The first were found in the autumn of 1752, fourteen years after the first discovery of Herculaneum, in and near the tablinum, and only numbered some 21 volumes and fragments, contained in two wooden cases. They were found in four places on four occasions. The woodwork of some of the presses that had contained them dropped to dust on exposure and many rolls were found lying about loosely. The papyri were found at a depth of about 120 feet (37 metres). Finally, a faint trace of letters was seen on one of the blackened masses, which was found to be a roll of papyrus, disintegrated by decay and damp, full of holes, cut, crushed, and crumpled. In appearance the rolls resembled lumps of charcoal and many were thrown away as such. A large number of papyri, after being buried eighteen centuries, have been found in the Villa named after them. Įthel Ross Barker noted in her 1908 Buried Herculaneum: Īppearance of the rolls. There may still be a lower section of the Villa's collection that remains buried. In 1752, workmen of the Bourbon royal family accidentally discovered what is now known as the Villa of the Papyri. They were then preserved by the layers of cement-like rock. This intense parching took place over an extremely short period of time, in a room deprived of oxygen, resulting in the scrolls' carbonization into compact and highly fragile blocks. Map of Villa of the Papyri.ĭue to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, bundles of scrolls were carbonized by the intense heat of the pyroclastic flows. For example, as many as 44 works discovered were written by the 1st-century BC Epicurean philosopher and poet Philodemus, a resident of Herculaneum, who possibly formed the library, or whose library was incorporated in it.ĭiscovery Dionysus, Plato, or Poseidon sculpture excavated at the Villa of the Papyri. The majority of classical texts referred to by other classical authors are lost, and there is hope that the continuing work on the library scrolls will discover some of these. The evolution of techniques to do this continues. However, reading the scrolls is extremely difficult, and can risk destroying them. The papyri, containing a number of Greek philosophical texts, come from the only surviving library from antiquity that exists in its entirety. They had been carbonized when the villa was engulfed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. The Herculaneum papyri are more than 1,800 papyrus scrolls discovered in the 18th century in the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum. Image contrast and brightness were enhanced to better visualize the details visible to the naked eye on their external surface. Scrolls from ancient Italy Photos of the papyrus fragments PHerc.1103 (a) and PHerc.110 (b,c).
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