There is all sorts of amazing science happening in the world right now, and as a layperson I have a "hot list" of probably a dozen different topics that can make me jump up and down when there's a new announcement. But the Herculaneum scrolls, for some reason, are a special case. I get just unreasonably excited whenever they make any progress.
I know that in the end this is "just" an ancient library of Epicurean philosophy and will probably have a bunch of redundant copies of stuff that is really only of interest to (the very few remaining) classicists. But I have looked at a lot of data in my time, and I just keep thinking that the data set is big enough that there will be a few outliers -- maybe one copy of a previously lost Aristophanes comedy that a friend sent the librarian as a joke or birthday present or something and was stuck in the back under a pile of philosophy.
It's really surprising to me that we have these language fragments that exist without any samples referencing the language itself.
I suppose for very young languages there wasn't a lot of need to specify that something was written in one vs the other given that any reader could just plainly see it with their eyes and perhaps didn't have a lot of cause to have "well, in Russian they X whereas in Japanese they Y" conversations.
But like...imagine a remote future in which we have only SMS fragments that read "you dtf" and "sup" and this weird purple thing with a green tip we're certain was a vegetable next to what we're absolutely convinced is a rendering of a butt and that's the entire corpus of the ancient XIZZY103.4 langauge.
I hope that in the Herculean and Pompey library’s at least some early Christian texts turn up as well.
Of all the “new testament” books we only have fragments form the first to the sixth century. It’s only with the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Alexandrinus from around 650? That you find a complete Bible.
I love the human sense (or vision) that we could find these in the 1750s as carbonized logs and know that we should keep and protect them - that we miiiiight be able to read them someday.
Come on, the (short) texts I've seen decoded were extremely exciting to me, surprising and event still relevant today. I think we have so comparatively little text from such an ancient time that every little passage we can recover is extremely valuable for preservation, historical context, or just philosophically, etc..
This is often said, but this passage could really have been written today:
"… we will inquire into something, but we
will not grasp it, if in some way we depart
from ourselves and from our own nature,
and besides, in the same way as the
remaining arts may be said to be perfected
in one respect, but to be deficient in
practical wisdom in another respect…"
From PHerc. 1667, col 17 (see Complete virtual unwrapping and reading of
a rolled Herculaneum papyrus, pg 25)
I'm reminded of the human genome project here - in that case there was a geometric ramp-up that meant we went from 1 or 2% sequenced to 100% really quickly. This sort of doubling when you can get it is pretty magical.
I'd like to imagine that we'll get something similar here sometime in the next ten years -- I understand there are (tens of?) thousands of these scrolls still to be scanned much less unrolled. Just an incredibly cool thing to be doing.
> I am Liam Warner, from northern England. I’m a freelance software engineer/consultant that has worked in areas such as video games, healthcare, and broadcasting technology.
> I am Nicola Bodill from Australia. I have a BA in Latin and Ancient Greek, and am a current MA student at the University of Sydney, working on a critical edition of a 2000-year-old Gandharan Buddhist birch-bark manuscript.
I wonder how many many "experts" fell into the trap of calling the reading of those scrolls "impossible" through the years? ("When a distinguished but elderly scientist states [...] that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong")
I know that in the end this is "just" an ancient library of Epicurean philosophy and will probably have a bunch of redundant copies of stuff that is really only of interest to (the very few remaining) classicists. But I have looked at a lot of data in my time, and I just keep thinking that the data set is big enough that there will be a few outliers -- maybe one copy of a previously lost Aristophanes comedy that a friend sent the librarian as a joke or birthday present or something and was stuck in the back under a pile of philosophy.
I suppose for very young languages there wasn't a lot of need to specify that something was written in one vs the other given that any reader could just plainly see it with their eyes and perhaps didn't have a lot of cause to have "well, in Russian they X whereas in Japanese they Y" conversations.
But like...imagine a remote future in which we have only SMS fragments that read "you dtf" and "sup" and this weird purple thing with a green tip we're certain was a vegetable next to what we're absolutely convinced is a rendering of a butt and that's the entire corpus of the ancient XIZZY103.4 langauge.
Of all the “new testament” books we only have fragments form the first to the sixth century. It’s only with the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Alexandrinus from around 650? That you find a complete Bible.
I suppose they must have left the worse one to hope and to us
This is often said, but this passage could really have been written today:
"… we will inquire into something, but we
will not grasp it, if in some way we depart
from ourselves and from our own nature,
and besides, in the same way as the
remaining arts may be said to be perfected
in one respect, but to be deficient in
practical wisdom in another respect…"
From PHerc. 1667, col 17 (see Complete virtual unwrapping and reading of a rolled Herculaneum papyrus, pg 25)
Very cool stuff.
I'd like to imagine that we'll get something similar here sometime in the next ten years -- I understand there are (tens of?) thousands of these scrolls still to be scanned much less unrolled. Just an incredibly cool thing to be doing.
> I am Liam Warner, from northern England. I’m a freelance software engineer/consultant that has worked in areas such as video games, healthcare, and broadcasting technology.
> I am Nicola Bodill from Australia. I have a BA in Latin and Ancient Greek, and am a current MA student at the University of Sydney, working on a critical edition of a 2000-year-old Gandharan Buddhist birch-bark manuscript.
Congrats to Nicola and Liam!
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws)