While many mourn the loss of innumerable historic artifacts (excellent link via Shelley Powers) as one of the many tragedies of the current conflict in Iraq, work progresses in Italy at using infrared imaging to recover writings from charred rolls of papyrus recovered from the ruins around Vesuvius.
The ceremony begins with the presentation of a small plaque to the contingent from BYU. Booras and his colleague Roger MacFarlane, a younger man in a seersucker jacket and a natty bow tie, step up to receive it almost bashfully. On a lectern to one side of the room sits a larger plaque the visitors presented to the library earlier. It displays two different pictures of the same scrap of papyrus. One shows neat lines of Greek lettering. The other is utterly illegible, a ground zero of text. The difference between them is Steve Booras’ camera.
Booras and his team have recorded images of every piece of Herculaneum papyrus in the library: 25,000 images on 345 CDs. The images were made with a high-quality digital camera. More important, most of them were also made with infrared filters. On a legible papyrus seen under normal light, the ink appears black because it absorbs the light; the papyrus reflects it. The carbonized fibers of the Herculaneum scrolls, however, absorb light just as well as the ink does, making the background a distinctly low-contrast black. But the papyrus does not absorb infrared wavelengths quite as readily; in the infrared, there is still contrast.
Most of the scrolls uncovered so far have been written by first-century philosopher and poet Philodemus, leading to conjecture that the owner of the villa where the scrolls were found may have been trying to save Philodemus’ work specifically — but there may be far more in the as-yet unearthed sections of the ruins.
Details of Philodemus’ biography are scarce. It’s not known when he was born or died, how long he spent in Alexandria (possibly) or Athens (definitely). It’s not known which, if any, of the various women featured in his often bawdy poetry might have been his wife, though the ones who required pay can probably be ruled out. But it is known that when he settled in Italy, he did so under the patronage of a high-powered plutocrat — Lucius Calpurnius Piso, one of the richest Romans of his day, scourge of Cicero and father-in-law to Caesar.
Why, then, were the uncovered works more or less all by Philodemus? One answer is that these papyruses were in the process of being saved from the disaster when the mud rolled over the villa, the boiling sea lapping at its lower terraces. The papyruses were discovered scattered along the colonnades, some loose, some in packing cases, as though they were in transit. The writings of Philodemus, goes the argument, had a special emotional value to Piso’s heirs, because Philodemus had once lived in the villa. So when the volcano erupted, slaves were sent to gather the scrolls and carry them down to the shore, where boats would take them to safety with the rest of the household. The bulk of the library — works by more famous hands, but not as precious to the family and more easily replaced — was abandoned. According to this theory, some buried part of the palace may contain a collection of ancient texts too commonplace to have been worth saving then and too valuable to ignore now.
Who knows what treasures may yet wait to be discovered, both around Vesuvius, in other areas of the world — and hopefully, eventually, once again in Iraq.