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Everything is related to Naples
Number 131 in this series. Link to all items here. 
                                      

If only the Pope had sent some alien paleontologist, maybe a gigantic version of the mantis shrimp (photo, below), whose eyes can see everything from ultraviolet through infrared. But, no, he sent a monk...

In talking about the so-called Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, we have to distinguish between the building (the villa) and what was found inside the villa, the papyrus scrolls. The villa is said to be the largest Roman villa ever found. (Only a small portion has been excavated, and as recently as the 1990s two previously undiscovered floors, built as terraces overlooking the sea, were discovered.)
What's the problem? I can read it!

The villa covered some 30,000 sq feet (2,790 sq meters) and probably belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso. That is certainly significant, and many of the splendid bronze and marble statues and other artifacts found on the premises have been moved to the Naples Archaeological Museum. (The villa has also been called the Villa dei Pisoni after the presumed Roman owner. (The villa has been reconstructed on the grounds of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California.)    
     
Of more interest to scholars, however, is the fact the villa contained a library, a collection of about 1800 texts written on papyrus scrolls. It is the only ancient Roman book collection ever found intact. “Intact,” is relative, however; the scrolls were badly scorched where they lay—turned into what look like sticks of charcoal—during the great eruption that destroyed Herculaneum and nearby Pompeii in 79 AD. There is some Latin material in the scroll library, but most of the material is in Greek and consists primarily of works on Epicurean philosophy by Philodemus of Gadara (c. 110 BC - c.35 BC). Some material is by Epicurus, himself—for example, his 37-volume life's work, On Nature. There are also other Epicurean philosophers present in the collection. Although some of Philodemus’ poetry had been known, his prose was unknown until the discoveries at Herculaneum. The library—a room, 3.2 x 3.2 meters (10 x 10 feet)—contained the shelves that held the scrolls. Some scrolls were also found elsewhere on the premises. The assumption is that since the entire collection centers on works of Epicurean philosophy—mainly Philodemus— and since he was known to have Lucius Calpurnius Piso as a patron, the collection must have been Philodemus' own private library set in his patron's villa. Thus, we presume Piso to have been the owner of the villa. (The alternative is that Philodemus owned the villa, but that would have made him one very rich philosopher, indeed. Not likely.)

Herculaneum and the villa were first uncovered during the first wave of archaeological enthusiasm during the early Bourbon rule of Naples. The first systematic digger was Karl Weber in the 1750s. Charles III, upon the advice of his capable minister, Bernardo Tanucci, called a commission into existence to study the texts. Attempts to simply unroll the scrolls were not a complete disaster, but some material was destroyed and some turned into jigsaw fragments of text that have yet to be reassembled. Yet, progress was made using an “unrolling device” invented by the Piarist monk, Antonio Piaggio (1713-1797), who was sent from Rome expressly for the purpose of helping to decipher the scrolls. Reports on the contents of the library were published as early as the 1790s, and a 2-volume facsimile edition was published in Oxford in 1825. Photographic imaging started to be used in the early 1900s and the results were published in 1914. In the 1980s they also used an ingenious method devised by Knut Kleve of the University of Oslo of chemically treating the papyri to make them legible.

The most recent efforts at deciphering the rolls have used the new technology of multi-spectral imaging. It is a technique developed in the early 1990s for imaging the earth from orbit, but other applications include taking pictures of the illegible Herculaneum papyri with different filters in the infrared and ultraviolet range; thus—since different substances (ink and papyrus, for example) reflect light differently—what appears to normal human vision (but not to that of the mantis shrimp!) to be black ink on black charcoal can be teased apart at the proper frequencies of light into visible, legible ink on papyrus. The imaging and digitizing of the results were done on the premises of the National Library in Naples from 2000 to 2002 by a team from the Center for the Study and Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts (CPART) of Brigham Young University in Utah.


The Office for the Study of the Herculaneum Papyri at the National Library is named for Marcello Gigante(1923-2001), the scholar who founded the International Center for the Study of the Herculaneum Papyri and, as well, started a department for papyrology at the University of Naples. The National Library currently has an archive stored on 364 CDs containing the contents of 965 papyri broken down into 30,000 separate images. They may be consulted by appointment.

It may be that further excavation of the villa will bring to light additional volumes of other Greek and Roman writers, plus more bronze and marble treasures. It may also be that that will never come to pass because most of ancient Herculaneum is beneath modern Ercolano. There are plans—or least plans for making plans. These are called “feasibility studies."  

There are various organizations dedicated to the study of the papyri. Among them:

—the National Library of Naples (which has owned the papyri since 1910);
—the “Marcello Gigante” International Center for the Study of the Herculaneum Papyri;
—the Center for the Study and Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts (CPART) of Brigham   Young University in Utah;
—the Philodemus Project of the University of California at Los Angeles.



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