Original subtitles

in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, a library\h of ancient scrolls is preserved when it is\h\h

burned and buried by the volcanic eruption\h of 79 AD. The volcano gave us the papyri,\h\h

that's certain. The only library ever recovered\h from antiquity comes to light in a new day. The\h\h

fact that they found 1,800 rolls of papyri\h from one villa in Herculanum is absolutely\h\h

staggering. From within these charred pages,\h scholars hope to recapture life in the days of\h\h

Pompeii and Herculaneum. It is a race against\h time and deterioration. We're losing pieces\h\h

of them all the time. 250 years after the scrolls\h were found, can new technologies help to read the\h\h

blackened pages?We have the application of\h space-age technology applied to texts that\h\h

have not been available for 2,000 years. And is\h there another library still buried at Herculaneum?

At the National Library in Naples, Italy,\h scholars read from the pages of history's\h\h

most fragile ancient library, scraps\h of papyri transported through time by\h\h

an unlikely set of circumstances. The\h eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD\h\h

burned and buried nearly 2,000 papyrus\h rolls. The carbonization preserved the\h\h

scrolls when they would have otherwise turned\h to dust. So this whole process preserved them\h\h

for us. If they hadn't been burnt in this\h way then they would have just rotted away.

I am a friend of Vesuvius because Vesuvius,\h with the eruption of 79 AD, has conserved\h\h

this papyrus. More than two centuries after they\h were first discovered, many scrolls have yet to\h\h

be unrolled or read. Only from the Villa de Papyri\h do we find these entire rolls. The problem is we\h\h

don't know fully how to unroll them when they're\h completely carbonized and blackened. From more\h\h

than 10,000 scattered and charred fragments,\h scholars work to recover the lost writings of\h\h

classical philosophers and new perspectives\h on two ancient cities silenced by Vesuvius.

In the ancient world the cities of Pompeii and\h Herculaneum reach their peak in the thriving\h\h

Roman Empire. Both cities are located between\h the Bay of Naples and the fertile foot of Mount\h\h

Vesuvius. Their archaeological remains provide a\h rare glimpse into the lives of both the rich and\h\h

the commoner in the first century. One of the\h really significant things we get from Pompeii\h\h

and Herculaneum is a pair of cities preserved\h in time, snapshots. So we learn exactly what\h\h

the living conditions were like for people in the\h First Century AD. In Pompeii you can see private\h\h

houses very vividly and I think people relate\h very closely to that because they can imagine\h\h

what was life like for a family in antiquity.\h They were nice places even the houses of bakers\h\h

and fullers and people that we would think are\h quite lower- middle-class, who had been given a\h\h

chance to enjoy themselves by the wonderful kind\h of first try at modern civilization that was the\h\h

Roman Empire. While they are sister cities Pompeii\h and Herculaneum have distinctive personalities.\h\h

The largest city, Pompeii, is a busy commercial\h center. Herculanum is located closer to Mount\h\h

Vesuvius than is Pompeii. The pace of this seaside\h community is more subdued. It is one of the most\h\h

beautiful towns on the Bay of Naples. Herculanum\h was very different from Pompeii. It was a seaside\h\h

town, it was something of a port therefore, but\h it always had a somewhat more cultured air to\h\h

it. It was in touch with the intellectual life\h of the day to a greater extent than Pompeii.\h\h

Herculaneum is a very small city, but also a\h very refined one especially regarding the villas,\h\h

and consequently at Herculaneum, we see houses,\h pictures ,and sculptures that are more beautiful\h\h

and rich than those that we see at Pompeii.\h Many of Rome's rich and powerful citizens\h\h

have properties here. One spectacular villa\h is owned by Julius Caesar's father-in-law,\h\h

a politician named Lucius Calpurnius Piso. He\h was consul in 58 BC, that's the most powerful\h\h

position that you can have in Rome. It's clear\h that whoever owned the villa was the most powerful\h\h

person around. From the verana of this seaside\h villa, the wealthy Piso family could gaze across\h\h

the Bay of Naples and enjoy a life of wealth and\h privilege. It's hard to realize how far above\h\h

the life of the common people the great Roman\h nobility were raised, in what was already this\h\h

incredibly rich empire, unless maybe you were to\h refer to such unheard of modern billionaires as\h\h

Bill Gates. To judge by the decorations in the\h villa, he would have been extremely wealthy,\h\h

and we must remember that this was his holiday\h home. Two thousand years later, this collection of\h\h

papyri would be the only known library to survive\h from antiquity. And the scrolls would miraculously\h\h

endure one of the greatest natural disasters\h ever recorded: the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.\h

The horror of an August day in 79 ad is forever\h etched in the faces of the victims of Veusivius.\h\h

As the volcano explodes around midday, a\h witness records the scene as a dark cloud\h\h

of ash stretches across the sky. And Pliny\h observed this strange mottled cloud and this\h\h

was the start of the eruption. Archaeology shows\h us what was actually going on in the cities at\h\h

the foot of Vesuvius and there it was absolutely\h dire. In the town of Pompeii, the town was being\h\h

covered by ash and pumice. You can reconstruct\h in minute by minute detail their deaths, which\h\h

were absolutely horrific. There is this long rain,\h the rain of ash comes down for at least 12 hours,\h\h

and it must be very choking but it doesn't\h actually kill people. And they're all trying\h\h

to find strategies for survival. Some of them get\h out of the city. Some of them hide. People were\h\h

choking and so on, but they were mostly able to\h escape. It was only the greedy ones who wanted to\h\h

go back for their money and their valuables who\h tended to succumb. Because of their locations,\h\h

the victims of Pompeii and Herculaneum meet very\h different ends. Pompeii is blanketed with falling\h\h

ash. The ash conforms perfectly to its victims\h preserving a nightmarish imprint of their deaths.\h\h

Herculanum's victims are enveloped by a cloud of\h gas then skeletonized by a flow of hot mud. At\h\h

a certain point, the volcano released a cloud of\h superheated gas and steam which the volcanologists\h\h

call a pyroclastic flow. This terribly hot mud\h mixed with gas heated to around 325° Celsius,\h\h

that's three times above boiling point, came\h down and overwhelmed everything in Herculaneum,\h\h

burying it in a depth probably of 70 ft. For many\h years it was thought that all of Herculaneum's\h\h

residents had escaped, but in the 1980s hundreds\h of skeletons were found clustered near the shore.\h\h

Certainly people were trying to escape from\h Herculaneum by boat. Near the shoreline hundreds\h\h

of skeletons were found. So they they didn't\h get out quickly enough and and then came the\h\h

pyroclastic flow and there's no getting away\h from that. It must have been a terrible end.

The city of Herculaneum would remain buried for\h 1700 years, its location forgotten as the modern\h\h

city of Ercolano is built above the site.\h But in 1709, a chance discovery reveals this\h\h

perfectly preserved ancient city buried under\h volcanic materia. The original discovery of the\h\h

town of Herculaneum was made when someone was\h digging a well, and they dug a well, and at the\h\h

bottom there was a statue. So this encouraged\h excavation, and it was done by tunneling. The\h\h

tunnels they were working in were only wide\h enough for one person and just tall enough\h\h

to walk under. They're following like moles these\h deep trenches along the foundations of the ancient\h\h

buildings and extracting sculpture and other\h precious items as they go. By today's standards,\h\h

the first excavations are not very scientific.\h Workers tunnel into the city and hunt for precious\h\h

objects. The immediate object of the excavations\h really was a treasure hunt. Charles of Bourbon\h\h

was most interested in the kinds of materials that\h he would then come to display in the Royal Museum.\h\h

The treasures from Herculaneum would fill the\h royal museums. The discoveries here, and later\h\h

at Pompeii, would attract international attention\h and turn Naples into a prime tourist destination.\h\h

People were realizing that these were some\h fundamental places that showed how the ancients\h\h

lived. This large firsthand discovery of an\h entire city really brought it home to people. The\h\h

archaeological discoveries would have long lasting\h impact on art and culture worldwide but no find\h\h

would attract more attention than the villa owned\h by Lucius Calpurnius Piso. The Villa de Papyri\h\h

turned out to have a extraordinary treasure trove\h of bronze sculpture and marble sculpture. There's\h\h

never been another Roman villa discovered that\h had a comparable amount of sculptural decoration.\h\h

Archaeologist Karl Weber would create this floor\h plan drawing of the villa in 1754, even though the\h\h

structure itself is still buried. He describes the\h vast estate as the most valuable and richest villa\h\h

in the ancient world. But the single most unique\h discovery from villa was almost overlooked: 1,800\h\h

carbonized papyrus rolls are at first mistaken for\h charcoal. In 1752, they were working in the Villa\h\h

of the Papyri and discovered these very mysterious\h objects which appeared to be lumps of coal.

They did not realize this were papyri. This\h is understandable because the concept of a\h\h

papyrus did not exist. They saw what looked like\h carbonized tree branches. We even know that the\h\h

first three or four papyri were burned for heat.\h It seems a number of them were thrown away or used\h\h

perhaps as as fuel on the fire but at some point\h somebody realized that there was writing on the\h\h

insides of these lumps and they understood that\h they were books. The fact that they found 1,800\h\h

rolls of papyri from from one villa in Herculaneum\h is absolutely staggering and of course one of our\h\h

great frustrations is that we cannot get back to\h ancient libraries. We can get back to Medieval\h\h

libraries, because medieval documents survive,\h but everything from antiquity has been burnt,\h\h

destroyed. The excavation supervisor notes that\h hundreds of scrolls are found scattered throughout\h\h

the villa. He talks about bringing up a huge load\h of them, even too too huge to carry himself. He\h\h

describes their nature. He says they're like lumps\h of charcoal. But Oxford scholar Dirk Obbink says\h\h

that the scrolls not only survived the heat of\h the Vesuvius eruption, they also were subjected\h\h

to rain and other forces. Well these are papyrus\h rolls, that they look just like they looked when\h\h

they were dug out of the ground in 1752, when they\h were first taken for lumps of coal. They've been\h\h

smashed by the pressure of the volcanic rubble\h that lay on top of them. They also got wet and the\h\h

rains that turned the ash into mud, that filled\h the buildings, which made them shrink around the\h\h

edges producing a trapezoidal shape of the papyrus\h rather than a round cylinder. The discovery of the\h\h

library at Herculaneum would attract international\h attention and anticipation. The news of this\h\h

incredible discovery made its way around the\h learned centers of Europe very very quickly,\h\h

and so people had great hopes that you might\h find lost tragedies of the great playwrights\h\h

of Greece. This was our first chance to reach\h directly into antiquity and try to pull something\h\h

out. In Naples, King Carlos sees the scrolls as\h a way to boost his prestige internationally. It\h\h

was good for the king's public Image to have such\h a treasure in his own kingdom. Anybody who came\h\h

to Naples after that time wanted to know what's\h with the papyri, can we see them, what have you\h\h

learned from them, how many have been unrolled.\h But for all their promise and possibility, there\h\h

is one serious problem. The carbonized scrolls\h are so fragile that they are nearly impossible\h\h

to unroll. iIt would be years before the king's\h staff would successfully unroll even one.

In the 18th century, the question of how to unroll\h the Herculaneum papyri presents a unique challenge\h\h

for curators. These things were very difficult to\h unroll and the first procedure that was followed\h\h

was was adopted by Camillo Paderni, a painter from\h Rome, who had a very undistinguished background as\h\h

far as antiquities were concerned. Paderni had a\h sort of rough and ready way of opening up papyri,\h\h

that is he took a knife to them. And one way\h which we know that he used was simply to take\h\h

a large knife and cut through the papyrus rolls\h lengthwise, to cut them into two halves. yYou\h\h

would then get two halves like this wouldn't you\h and and he would expose layers of writing on the\h\h

inside running across, in fact scraping off the\h damaged layers. And he crushed all the material\h\h

in the middle and then he just emptied that out\h onto his workbench ,and he would continue doing\h\h

that until he had got closer to the external part\h of the papyrus and on that layer, he could read a\h\h

certain amount of continuous text, that is to say\h he could see a certain number of letters which\h\h

seemed to follow one after the other, because\h he couldn't actually read Greek. Paderni was an\h\h

ignorant brute, I think that's very clear, but he\h has the glory of having invented the technique of\h\h

sawing them in half. As we're told, Paderni took\h for his butchery the best preserved papyri. It's\h\h

really just incalculable to say what what we\h will have lost. Visiting scientists including\h\h

the prince of come to Naples to test their own\h theories about unrolling the scrolls. This person\h\h

thought that liquid mercury, because it seems so\h slippery, and doesn't seem to move with friction\h\h

through anything, would be able to slip in between\h the rolls of the papyrus and would therefore\h\h

separate them cleanly. So he constructed a big box\h into which a papyrus roll was stood on its end,\h\h

and he then filled the box from the top with\h liquid mercury. Well this seemed like a good\h\h

idea at the time, but when they opened up the\h box again all they found was that the density\h\h

of the mercury had simply pulverized the papyrus\h with nothing left but powder. There were other\h\h

attempts made to unroll the papyri as well,\h often using chemical solvents. And the worst\h\h

was Sir Humphrey Davy, the greatest chemist\h in England, who was absolutely sure that he\h\h

was going to find some chemical compound\h that wouldn't reduce them to dust, and got\h\h

as far as finding one that only broke them into\h fragments. He was even allowed to go to Naples in\h\h

the 1820s and tried his experiments. And after\h he reduced about 12 more scrolls to fragments,\h\h

gave up. Facing criticism from all of Europe,\h the king eventually enlists help from the Vatican\h\h

which responds by sending a trained conservator\h to Naples, but Paderni does not welcome Antonio\h\h

Piaggio's arrival. Piaggio basically thought that\h Paderni was a butcher. He kept talking about the\h\h

slaughter that he had inflicted on these papyri.\h Father Piaggio was much more careful, much more\h\h

sophisticated in his approach, and he was the one\h who devised the unrolling machine with which they\h\h

could finally begin to unroll these papyri.\h The method was that you pasted sort of very\h\h

fine animal membrane on the back of the papyri and\h then very very gently separate the layer off that\h\h

membrane serves to hold the papyrus together as it\h sort of crumbles away from the rest of the scroll,\h\h

and is rolled upward. Once a a strip of papyrus of\h some length is acquired, then the person running\h\h

the machine comes with a very sharp knife and cuts\h that piece off, lays it flat and allows it to dry.\h\h

It's a very painstaking process because you had to\h continually find ways of supporting the papyrus so\h\h

that it wouldn't disintegrate as it came off\h the roll. You had to find the leading edge of\h\h

the papyrus which was by no means an easy kind of\h thing to do. The method of unrolling the scrolls\h\h

is very slow, painstaking work. The first papyrus\h which was unrolled took four years to unroll,\h\h

proceeding at at a rate of millimeters per day.\h By the end of the century, only a handful of\h\h

scrolls have been unrolled. Despite the slow pace\h of the work, the scrolls are a form of political\h\h

currency for the Neapolitan monarchy. There was\h no no court, no individual aristocrat, I imagine,\h\h

who didn't have some interest in finding out what\h was involved in those texts. The queen of Naples\h\h

Caroline Murat, Napoleon Bonaparte's younger\h sister, would sometimes present scroll fragments\h\h

as diplomatic gifts. Napoleon himself receives\h several scrolls, which would later be unrolled and\h\h

translated by French scholars. Through a series\h of sometimes strange trades, papyrus rolls would\h\h

end up in Berlin, Copenhagen, and other European\h cities. One of the most interesting anecdotes told\h\h

about the the trafficking in Herculaneum Papryi is\h the exchange, or we should say alleged exchange,\h\h

of 18 kangaroos for 18 scrolls of papyrus. They\h were presented to the Prince Regent in the early\h\h

19th century by the King of Naples, and he gave 18\h of these rolls to the Prince Regent and in return\h\h

he received 18 fully grown kangaroos, so that's\h the exchange rate: one papyrus per kangaroo.\h\h

Contemporary sources treat this incident as if\h it is in fact something rather scandalous. One of\h\h

the sources includes the detail that the kangaroos\h were deformed, as if it somehow cheapens the deal.\h\h

Eventually several scrolls, and an important set\h of drawings related to the papyri, would end up\h\h

at Oxford University. In 1802 the Prince of Wales\h sends the Reverend John Hayter to Naples to work\h\h

on the scrolls. It was the biggest piece of luck\h these payri ever had that this man came there,\h\h

and he got fascinated with the technique of\h opening the papyri and opened up the 500-600\h\h

Scrolls that form the basis of our collection\h and our reading today. And Hayter stayed there\h\h

for a number of years and the work proceeded\h much more rapidly under his care. Hayter makes\h\h

careful drawings of each scroll fragment as it is\h opened and in 1806 the army of Napoleon came and\h\h

the royal family fled and Hayter fled with all his\h drawings he' made. There was some sort of scandal,\h\h

I think. He took with him the drawings which had\h been made and they now reside in the Bodleian\h\h

Museum at Oxford. Today the Hayter drawings are an\h important resource for papyrologists because they\h\h

document how the scrolls looked when they were\h first opened, and they're a principal resource\h\h

for constructing the text because he saw lots of\h things that aren't there now. In the two centuries\h\h

since the scrolls were found, no easy system\h has been developed for unrolling them. The most\h\h

recent innovation, known as the Oslo method,\h uses special glues to stabilize the scroll\h\h

fragments and minimize damage during unrolling.\h It involves applying a mixture of acetic acid and\h\h

gelatin with brush strokes onto the outside of a\h scroll, and then when that dries it forms a very\h\h

fragile but cohesive shell. When the shell comes\h off the interior layer of that piece is revealed,\h\h

on which the text is recorded. The problem with\h doing that is every time a little bit is peeled\h\h

off, the papyrus breaks slightly and you can see a\h break about every centimeter or so, where they've\h\h

pulled a little bit more off and then a little bit\h more off. It remains glued to the rice paper but\h\h

from a conservation point of view you've actually\h destroyed a bit of papyrus every time it breaks,\h\h

and over a period of time that's where the papyrus\h will wear. Those who work to read and publish the\h\h

thousands of fragments now stored in Naples face\h unusual challenges making sense of the carbonized\h\h

and crushed papyri. Well I suppose they look\h like toast. They are brown, dark brown, bits of\h\h

them are sort of grayish, very broken fragmentary\h surface. And then against that you can see a kind\h\h

of shinier gray ink, that's what we're looking for\h of course is this ink. The surface is not at all\h\h

flat, there are ridges in it which come from the\h papyrus having been rolled up and then squashed.\h\h

It was like flattening out a potato chip. Papyrus\h is a little thicker than potato chips but it's\h\h

nearly as brittle. You can't sit at a table put\h the papyrus flat on that table, look through the\h\h

microscope and you'll see everything. You have\h to keep on moving it constantly trying to get the\h\h

exactly the right angle at which the ink shows\h up. Sometimes what's happened is that part of\h\h

one layer has come apart from the layer to which\h it belongs, and that piece of papyrus has become\h\h

attached to the wrong layer. When this papyrus\h came unrolled, like many of the Herculaneum\h\h

papyri, the layers stuck to each other and when\h you're reading the papyrus, sometimes almost\h\h

imperceptively, you find that you're reading text\h that belongs on a different part of the papyrus,\h\h

and you can hardly even see that the layers have\h stuck to each other. A typical publication of a\h\h

scroll fragment will be full of holes. Patient\h scholars work on an elaborate puzzle, trying to\h\h

fill in text that others may have missed. One\h feels kind of desperate having 75% or 35% of a\h\h

text but the conditions are such that you can't\h read it all, and this is what drives scholars\h\h

on. I never think of this as a hideous work, it's\h almost addictive really. What you find when you're\h\h

in Naples reading the papyrus is that you're angry\h every time you have to leave the Officina because\h\h

it's closing. After I've worked on the papyri\h all day, when I go to sleep I will frequently\h\h

have letters dancing in front of my eyes there's\h no doubt of this. Despite the efforts of scholars\h\h

over 250 years, some scrolls have revealed little\h or no text, and have not been identified or\h\h

published. In 1969 Professor Marcello Gigante\h launches a renewed international effort to\h\h

read and publish the papyri. And from the very\h beginning I wanted international collaboration.

At a conference in 1999, Gigante meets an American\h team that is using new imaging technology to read\h\h

burned manuscripts. He invites the team to\h Naples but they are initially discouraged by\h\h

the poor condition of the papyri. When I looked at\h them, first I thought well this is the destructive\h\h

power of a volcano. They look in the worst shape\h of any papyri I've ever seen. When they arrive at\h\h

the National Library, Steve and Susan Booras of\h Brigham Young University set out to see if the\h\h

new technology called multi-spectral imaging can\h reveal any new text on the blackened papyri. They\h\h

quickly determine that the technology makes it\h possible to isolate the text from the carbonized\h\h

background. You've got black ink on black papyri,\h but each one of those have different reflective\h\h

characteristics. While the eye sees black ink\h and black papyrus, multispectral imaging is\h\h

based on reflectivity. Because the ink and the\h papyrus reflect light differently, they can be\h\h

easily distinguished from each other, especially\h in the infrared spectrum. In the infrared region,\h\h

we have a different set of responses and\h so what we see as a black paper may appear\h\h

light gray in the infrared region, and the ink\h will appear black, and so we see now black on\h\h

a gray background, we photograph that, and it's\h easy to read. Here we have a scorze, a fragment\h\h

which is an outer layer of a scroll. You can\h see evidence of the writing with the unaided\h\h

eye. This fragment right now is being shown in a\h visible light filter, it's about 500 NM. There's\h\h

really no evidence that there's writing at all.\h Now we're about 700 NM, start the camera back up,\h\h

reduce the light, we're starting to see a little\h bit of text in here. I'm going to focus it again,\h\h

we're now seeing an image with almost complete\h text in the infrared using a 1,000 nanometer\h\h

filter, which before, the very first image using\h visible filters, we were seeing virtually no text.\h\h

Multi-spectral imaging was originally developed\h for the space program NASA's Jet Propulsion\h\h

Laboratory uses the technology to study the\h Earth and other planets. People at JPL have\h\h

tried to determine what's on the surface of some\h of the planets on their flybys and that gave rise\h\h

to the idea that perhaps, on a smaller scale, we\h could now start to image some of these troublesome\h\h

texts and archaeological objects. In Naples, when\h word spreads about the new technology, skeptical\h\h

papyrologists immediately bring the BYU team their\h most difficult fragments for study. I just told\h\h

them well if you really can bring out new letters\h I've got a challenging test case there is a piece\h\h

of papyrus which Richard Janko and I worked\h over for an entire hour with the microscope,\h\h

and all that is visible on it is blank surface\h plus remnants of two or three Greek letters,\h\h

so if you can do something with that one I'll\h be very impressed. So with fear and trembling,\h\h

they took the piece of papyrus in, put it under\h the multiple imaging spectrum, started turning\h\h

it up and right in front of Jeffrey Fish's\h and my amazed eyes, every single letter on\h\h

the papyrus sprang to life. Well I thought he was\h going to have a stroke but he was very excited. I\h\h

actually moved out of the way and he sat down at\h the screen, he maneuvered the text on the screen,\h\h

so you could see the full column of text and\h I I think he sat there for 10, 15, 20 minutes,\h\h

looking over that text for the very first time.\h Richard Janko had a similar experience with\h\h

another fragment that had been very difficult to\h read. And suddenly instead of three letters there\h\h

were 60 letters. We went back to the library to\h check this, to confirm these readings, I assumed\h\h

that I would be able to confirm them and after\h 10 minutes we realized that we had the fragment\h\h

upside down, and I realized also that we could\h never confirm these results with the human eye,\h\h

because the human eye cannot see those wavelengths\h of light. These before and after images show what\h\h

was visible to the human eye and the text that\h is then revealed in the infrared spectrum.

The letters are kind of leaping out of the papyrus\h in ways that we never imagined and so we're\h\h

getting new words, we're getting new new letters,\h new new thoughts, new readings.The multispectral\h\h

images would allow for dramatic new readings. They\h would also allow for study of the papyri outside\h\h

of Naples. So which filter is this one, with this\h filter was at 450 NM so pretty much visible light,\h\h

visible light, naked eye. Yeah this image, which\h obviously is very striking was taken with a 1,000\h\h

nanometers that's in the infrared. Now we've\h taken these two images and done a photographic\h\h

print out. It really is amazing when you compare\h the 450 nanometer image with the the 1,000 nanomer\h\h

image. Here there really is almost nothing\h that can be read and Gigante doesn't rate it\h\h

very high in fact 1491 known uno poco legible,\h so hardly or scarcely legible, and pessimo,\h\h

in really bad shape. One of the interesting\h things is that it's cataloged among the papyri\h\h

Latini when in fact it's obviously Greek. Here\h you have entire words. It's almost certainly a\h\h

philosophical text. You can read complete sections\h of text essentially wherever it's not broken away.\h\h

Here we've got a text that we can actually\h do something with and read. Is this worthy of\h\h

publication? Definitely. It's uh this is a sort of\h thing that a papyrologist would be ecstatic about\h\h

getting a text in in a condition this good. For\h scholars like Gigante, the new images will make it\h\h

necessary to revise old readings and publications. This is papyrus number 1050 that I have been\h\h

studying for many years, more than half a\h century. I should now make a new complete edition.

I think that without doubt the\h new photographic proceeding that\h\h

is important contribution to\h the progress of our papyri.

What is emerging from the scrolls today with\h greater clarity than ever before is a picture\h\h

of Roman intellectual life in the first century.\h We have archaeological remains which can speak\h\h

to us in a certain way but they can't speak to\h us in quite the same way as those places which\h\h

have left writings. There are certain kinds of\h questions that you cannot get answered from the\h\h

mere material remains. We need to have what\h people wrote, this is the thing which gives\h\h

us the best insight into their thinking, their\h way of lives, their highest thoughts and their\h\h

highest aspirations. It is believed that the\h Villa of the Papyri where the scrolls were all\h\h

found was home to a school of philosophy, led\h by an Epicurian philosopher named Philodemus.\h\h

His writings provide new insight into Epicurian\h beliefs. They are of incomparable value for anyone\h\h

who's interested in Epicurianism. This is the\h ur text of epicureanism. And here you have for\h\h

example among the Epicurians, a group of people\h who were intelligent, who were responding to\h\h

many of the same kinds of life pressures that we\h are, and who had a philosophy to which they were\h\h

deeply committed, which tried to make them happy.\h While they are not considered religious texts,\h\h

the philosophical scrolls do address some\h of the same questions posed by religion,\h\h

questions about gods, about a virtuous life and\h about death. Epicurians saw that one of the ways\h\h

in which you eliminate pain from your life is to\h eliminate fear, and in particular fear of death,\h\h

fear of the afterlife, there is dispute about\h whether Epicureans literally believed in gods.\h\h

I think that they did. But in any case it's\h clear that those gods have nothing at all\h\h

to do with us they are not interested in us\h they do not interfere in our lives for good\h\h

or evil. It was a world in which most people\h worship the gods without believing in them,\h\h

and the philosophers said, "well find your inner\h God and be tranquil in yourself and reach out\h\h

to friends who think the same way, and then\h you'll live as happy a life as can be lived."\h\h

What has not been found in the scrolls so far\h is any reference to early religious movements,\h\h

including Christianity. At the time of the\h eruption, many religions were active at Pompeii\h\h

and Herculaneum. Christianity had begun to take\h root in the area. The Apostle Paul even visited\h\h

the nearby city of Pozzouli as a missionary\h 30 years before the eruption of Vesuvius.

So at the time of Paul, a thriving congregation\h existed at Pozzouli. He stopped there for many\h\h

days. Ut would not be a great stretch to imagine\h that the Christians at Pozzouli transferred their\h\h

message to Pompeii, the city with the port nearest\h its own. A lot of people are kind of skeptical\h\h

about Christianity having made it to Herculaneum\h by 79 ad I'm not at all. I I think that ideas tend\h\h

to move fast, especially very appealing ideas,\h very beautiful ideas. Although Christians were\h\h

probably there at the time of the eruption,\h most scholars believe that the Herculaneum\h\h

papyri are very unlikely to contain Christian\h references because of the age and ownership of\h\h

the library. The latest of the papyri in this\h library were written about 15 BC. They were\h\h

already you know quite old when the volcano blew\h up, but if you're expecting works comparable to\h\h

the Christian gospels, no there wouldn't, I don't\h think there would be anything like that. This was\h\h

a philosophical library belonging to a member of\h the elite. Their influences would be Greek. They\h\h

wouldn't be Jewish. They wouldn't be Christian,\h but because all of the Scrolls have not been read,\h\h

it is possible that other religious references\h may yet be found. What may still be hidden here\h\h

is a subject of great speculation for scholars\h who, like their 18th century predecessors,\h\h

hold out hope for new texts and more prominent\h authors. Well people were aware of course that\h\h

vast quantities of what might be considered the\h best of ancient literature had been lost and so\h\h

people had great hopes for this that you might\h find the lost tragedies of the great playwrights\h\h

of Greece, or that you might find the lost books\h of the historian Livy, and you would discover all\h\h

the things that people had come to admire the\h remnants of in the Renaissance. People asked me\h\h

are we going to find some Aristotle and I think\h it's very unlikely that we would find a full\h\h

text of an Aristotle or a Plato, but the habit\h of the school was to read passages from other\h\h

philosophers and discuss them, and consequently\h it isn't ,impossible that we get big passages from\h\h

,greater philosophers still. The unread scrolls\h might also provide more literature by women,\h\h

like the poet Sappho whose writings rarely survive\h from antiquity. We have already some quotations\h\h

of Sappho in some of the philosophical writings\h but they're limited in extent. Rather little was\h\h

written by women in antiquity but we would be\h very lucky indeed to find their writings. This\h\h

was something which most women did not have\h the leisure or the means or the education to\h\h

do. Despite all that has been reclaimed from\h Vesuvius, there is a sense among scholars that\h\h

the current collection is incomplete, that\h there may be something more, perhaps another\h\h

entire library still buried at Herculaneum. I\h can't believe that there wasn't another library,\h\h

another library with lost plays of Sophocles and\h Aeschylus, with maybe roles of of lyric poetry\h\h

that we don't have, rolls of beautiful poetry.\h In the 18th century, excavations at the Villa of\h\h

the Papyri were abandoned because of poisonous\h gases in the tunnels. When he rediscovered the\h\h

villa in the 20th century, archaeologist\h Antonio de Simone hoped to excavate the\h\h

entire structure. At the time he didn't realize\h just how much the first excavations had missed.\h\h

It would be a major undertaking to bring to\h light just one part of the villa, which was\h\h

buried under the modern city of Ercolano. We\h are in the Villa of the Papyri, and this is\h\h

the arcade outside the atrium. This point offered\h the best panoramic view. We have to imagine that\h\h

this mosaic-decorated floor was part of a hallway\h in a great balcony that face the Gulf of Naples

Even after 2,000 years, the beautiful\h mosaic floors and fresco-covered walls\h\h

reveal the wealth and elite status\h of the original owners. These owners\h\h

were familiar with philosophy Virgil, who\h probably stayed here, as did Philodemus,\h\h

these great representatives of ancient literature\h and philosophy, and the refinement of the house\h\h

furnished a most appropriate context for the\h circle of intellectuals who visited here.

When we resumed the excavation of this site,\h we came down to this level on this mosaics\h\h

to verify what had been done in the 18th\h century. We came down through a well that\h\h

was here but can't be seen anymore because\h it was taken out during the excavations. It\h\h

was not far from this site where nearly 2,000\h papyrus rolls were found in the 18th century,\h\h

in room number five which is still unexcavated.\h And from room number five along this trajectory\h\h

were found at the nearly 2,000 papyri that are\h now kept in the National Library in Naples.

But De Simone says the discovery of the\h papyri was unusual. The library was not\h\h

intact. Scrolls were found scattered along the\h floor. He believe that when Vesuvius erupted,\h\h

the papyri were being moved to safety.

In all likelihood the owners of the\h villa considered the papyri a very\h\h

valuable possession and so, in the\h process of fleeing towards the sea,\h\h

they tried to save these papyri by carrying the\h cases with them. If an effort was being made to\h\h

move the papyri, during in the course of the\h the few days in which the eruption took place,\h\h

then the papyri might then have been transported\h to a more distant part of the villa or the villa\h\h

grounds. It's possible that if you find the way\h in which they would have got out of the house,\h\h

and the way in which they would have got down\h to the sea from the house, that there might be\h\h

other traveling boxes for example that would be\h found along that route. Many scholars agree that\h\h

there may be other papyri found in locations\h throughout the villa. If you're asking are\h\h

there going to be more texts discovered, well,\h yes, I'd say probably there are a lot more still\h\h

buried. And if there was a main library, then the\h chances are it could well still be there. In 1996,\h\h

the prospect of finding another library here\h increases when De Simone makes a startling\h\h

discovery. He determines that the original villa\h of the papyri was at least three stories tall,\h\h

but only the top level has ever been excavated\h or explored. Here we are on the lower level just\h\h

below the public area of the villa. As you can\h see it's an impressive facade, well constructed.\h\h

This level was made up of living quarters not for\h the servants but for the masters of the house.

A rare glimpse inside this room\h reveals beautiful frescos and mosaics.

This lower level is full of rooms with\h mosaics on the floors and important\h\h

pictures on the walls. First of all we\h can say that this room isn't isolated.\h\h

You have access to other rooms and from\h this room you can enter the other rooms.\h\h

This is all that remains of the wooden door\h that led to the other rooms. Above the door\h\h

is a board painted red and a frame with painted\h friezes and even further up other decorations.

The vault is decorated as well. On the\h vault we see a stucco frame that runs\h\h

along the sides and splits into decorations\h of climbing ivy, and from this room one could\h\h

have gone into still another one. This\h is the door jamb of another passageway\h\h

so from this room one could have gone in any\h direction. I believe, in fact I'm convinced,\h\h

that in this levels there are certainly other\h papyri brought down here by the villa's owners\h\h

who were trying to save themselves. On the\h lower levels of the villa, 20th century\h\h

archaeologists find two new works of sculpture.\h Many believe that if there is sculpture on these\h\h

levels there could also be more papyri. On the\h first layer of the villa that was on the sea,\h\h

two beautiful heads were found. I wrote an article\h right away: today the heads, tomorrow the papyri,\h\h

because as we were able to find these new works\h of art so we will be able to find the papyri.

Modern archaeologists are forced to stop digging\h here before they can open this door to see what\h\h

is on the other side. The dig is one casualty of\h a new government policy to suspend excavation and\h\h

focus instead on preservation of Italy's many\h archaeological sites, but many scholars are\h\h

hopeful that one day the villa excavation\h will be reopened. If there is a library,\h\h

I think that that the water that I've seen around\h the excavation could perhaps be be seeping down\h\h

and and destroying the papyrus rolls, so I\h have a great hope that the excavations will\h\h

be continued. Well in general I would support\h excavation in the villa eventually but there\h\h

are many problems with such an excavation. For\h one thing it's not normally considered a good\h\h

archaeological technique to go looking for\h something in particular. You know that that\h\h

beautiful villa can't fail to be a great artistic\h discovery, that's really the important thing,\h\h

and I think to say we've got to get in there and\h get the papyri is the mistake because it's the\h\h

whole complex. Perhaps no one is more anxious\h to see what is inside the villa than Marcello\h\h

Gigante. There is a part of the villa which never\h was excavated, we know this, and then we hope that\h\h

the archaeologists will again excavate our villa.\h While the original Villa of the Papyri is still\h\h

buried, it is possible to experience the richness\h of the Villa firsthand, not in Naples, Italy,\h\h

but in Malibu, California. J Paul Getty's replica\h of the Villa of the Papyri, built in the 1970s,\h\h

was based on the original 18th century floor\h plan drawings. A collector of antiquities,\h\h

Getty wanted to create an authentic setting for\h his collections. He said I wanted to build a\h\h

building that was the kind of place in which the\h objects would originally have been displayed,\h\h

so that people could really appreciate them in\h something analogous to their original context.\h\h

It does give people a very good sense of what a\h Roman luxury villa was like. This mosaic floor\h\h

is a replica of the first pavements found in\h the Villa of the Papyri in the 18th Century.\h\h

The Getty Villa succeeded in capturing the\h grandeur of the original Villa of the Papryi\h\h

at Herculaneum. At one point the superintendent\h of excavations traveled from Pompeii to Malibu\h\h

to see the museum. He said it's extraordinary\h this is the only place where one can really\h\h

experience a Roman luxury Villa as it was\h intended to be seen. J. Paul Getty never\h\h

saw the finished Getty Villa in person, but the\h museum stands as his tribute to the ancient world.

Today at Herculaneum, the debate continues\h about the future of the original Villa of\h\h

the Papyri. Most archaeologists agree that it is\h more important to preserve what has already been\h\h

excavated here than to expose new parts of the\h site. We simply don't have very good techniques\h\h

in many cases for conserving these objects. In\h fact the situation around there is so disastrous\h\h

that many things which we could preserve aren't\h being preserved simply because we don't have\h\h

the money and the people to do it. Everything\h is in a critical condition. Wherever you go,\h\h

you see the appalling difficulty of maintaining\h what has been excavated. You can look at the\h\h

bits that were excavated in the 18th Century,\h and they're reduced effectively to bare walls,\h\h

to rubble. You can't see any frescoes. If\h they are any mosaics they've long since\h\h

been overgrown by vegetation, and so on and\h essentially it's lost apart from the very\h\h

bare bones of the skeleton. The few excavations\h that are active today at Pompeii are different\h\h

from those in the 18th Century. They focus on\h the Pre-Roman history of the city. There is\h\h

very little pressure or interest in exposing\h new parts of the city, because of the problem\h\h

of maintaining and preserving the rest of it.\h (Take this out carefully here...when you get\h\h

into here you can't do more...) Everything that\h hasn't been actually restored within the last\h\h

10 years needs restoration now, and that is why\h there's so much worry about doing new excavation.\h\h

If you can't maintain the excavations of\h as recently as 50, or even 30 years ago,\h\h

how can you justify doing new excavation which\h will add to the problem? The Italian government\h\h

has made big efforts in recent years to increase\h the money spent on the very costly process\h\h

of restoring and maintaining the site. I think\h that's very welcome but maybe you can never win.

Like the archaeological sites that were\h frozen in time when they were sealed under\h\h

volcanic material, the Herculaneum papyri are also\h deteriorating. I mean we're losing pieces of them\h\h

all the time. The papyri are disintegrating in\h front of our very eyes. When you look at a scroll,\h\h

there is black dust over the whole thing. If\h you just take a little bitty piece of of this\h\h

carbonized papyrus and just touch it,it just\h turns to dust immediately. One's always afraid,\h\h

when working over the materials, of sneezing.\h It is a terrifying thought that one could blow\h\h

away part of the scroll by an ill-advised\h sneeze. Deterioration has always been a\h\h

big issue. Even Piaggio says that the longer a\h scroll has been open the fainter its characters\h\h

have become. The texts that I'm working on,\h when I started working on them 10 years ago,\h\h

I could read many more letters in them than I\h can read today. We have no photographic record\h\h

of what they looked like then because photographic\h techniques were not such that they could capture\h\h

them. On the 250th anniversary year of the\h scrolls' discovery, the National Library and\h\h

Brigham Young University complete an imaging\h project as they work to convert multi-spectral\h\h

images of more than 10,000 scroll fragments\h into a permanent digital library. Well no one\h\h

has really come up with a particularly good way of\h conserving the Herculaneum papyri because anything\h\h

you do to them alters them, and so the modern\h approach to conservation is to try to make as\h\h

good an image of an object as possible, and these\h images are, so far, the best that we've been able\h\h

to get. It's really exciting to have tens of\h thousands of images in the digital library.\h\h

No matter what happens to the originals, we'll\h be able to now have digital images that will\h\h

survive indefinitely. The creation of a digital\h library will assure that the philosophers and\h\h

writers whose voices are heard only through the\h Herculaneum papyri will never be silenced again.

Mount Vesuvius looms over cities ancient and\h modern here on the Bay of Naples. The active\h\h

volcano is a constant reminder of an ancient\h tragedy. I'm always struck by just how close\h\h

Vesuvius is. It's always looming up on the\h horizon. You can't forget that it's there and\h\h

I suppose the people who lived there perhaps they\h did forget that it was there and they couldn't\h\h

believe what was happening. For visitors here,\h there is always a sense of the people who lived\h\h

in these spaces and built these cities. I would\h like to feel the ghosts of antiquity rather more\h\h

strongly and not less strongly. In a sense what\h I want to do is is is feel their presence here\h\h

and how did they use these spaces that we see.\h You can see the moment of death very vividly,\h\h

but in a sense what I want is not the moment\h of death. It's getting behind that to the to\h\h

the life, the many moments of life behind\h that, and it is here, the traces are here,\h\h

and it requires a patient effort of historical\h imagination to put those traces together and\h\h

recapture ancient life. The Herculaneum papyri\h alone reveal the people's thoughts and daily lives\h\h

in the days before Vesuvius swallowed up these\h ancient cities. It makes me sad that that kind of\h\h

tragedy was what froze Herculaneum so that we can\h read these texts. I love to imagine Philodemius\h\h

reading these things to people like Virgil. I\h love putting myself back back there in the villa.

It is silent here in the Villa of the Papyri,\h where a doorway stands unopened and a part of\h\h

the villa unexplored. The scholars who\h study the Herculaneum papyri recognize\h\h

that the work has its own timetable.\h Still they are anxious and hopeful\h\h

that the search will one day resume for a\h lost library. I'm disappointed, of course,\h\h

like so many things in this long story,\h which takes place at time intervals which\h\h

aren't really compatible with the scale of\h a single human life, that that brings up\h

the prospect that I may in the end be too old and\h tired to rejoice in these new papyri if they ever\h\h

get discovered. I hope that before my death, I\h can see the all of the villa the light of our sun.