As far back as the ancient Egyptians (i.e., as far back as 4,000 BC), papyrus was used as writing support for essential documents.
Manufacturing papyrus is an art by itself and a very time-consuming
operation. The papyrus reed has to be picked upstream of the Nile,
where the stems were harvested. After being cleaned, the triangular stems were cut into
long strips. These thin strips were then laid out in two layers, one horizontal
and one vertical, that were then pressed together and dried to form the
ultimate papyrus sheet. Thanks to its natural gum, these sheets could also be
laid side by side to produce a roll, which, when inscribed, would become the
known scrolls from antiquity. It is mind-blowing to think how much reed
had to be turned into papyrus to produce all the literature from antiquity. We
cannot even imagine how many people were involved in making papyrus, whose production
must have been organized on an industrial scale.
In the dry desert climate of Egypt, such scrolls could safely
survive for centuries, as was proven by the thousands of pieces that emerged
from the garbage heap at Oxyrhynchus. Elsewhere documents
were primarily preserved by chance. One such find happened, for instance, in Herculaneum , the Italian city buried under
a thick layer of volcanic ash following the eruption of Mount
Vesuvius in 79 AD.
In those days, Herculaneum ,
just like Pompeii , was a plush
resort town where rich people from Rome sought
solace from the summer heat. One such Roman was Lucius Calpurnis Piso Caesoninus, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, who built a grand seaside
villa lavishly decorated with more than eighty bronze and marble
statues of the finest quality. This is the Villa that Paul Getty copied in Malibu ,
California , to house his
collection of antiquities.
Besides the impressive collection of artwork, Piso’s Villa also yielded a library of
some 2,000 scrolls, the only one that survived from the classical world.
Unfortunately, we cannot read any of these scrolls since they turned into lumps
of charcoal, the result of the pyroclastic blast that carbonized the papyri
before the city caught fire and sank into oblivion under the volcanic ashes. When
first discovered, these black burnt logs were not recognized as scrolls, and
some were hacked into pieces. A later conservator of the Vatican tried in the 18th century
to painstakingly unroll them, spending four years on one single scroll, and many
chips just broke off. Even in the 1980s, experts from Oxford University could not do much, and the reading was challenging even under
changing light or under a microscope. Manipulating the papyri did more damage
than good as fragments crumbled to dust. Towards the end of the
1990s, infrared light helped to decipher some of the texts, followed by
multi-spectral imaging providing more precise images of the letters and texts.
Unrolling the scrolls was the major problem. In 2009, the Institut de France in Paris used
Computerized Tomography (CT) scans to read the internal surfaces of the
scrolls. The task was tough even with this modern technology since
the rolls were tightly wound and creased. The easy sections could be
converted into 2D images, but another problem arose when it was discovered that
the chemistry of the ink blended in with the chemistry of the paper; the main
reason is that ancient ink does not contain any metal.
This all means that we may need new technology
or procedures to come to our rescue to decipher these scrolls that
may contain lost works from known or even unknown antique authors.
The Hellenistic world, which ruled the Mediterranean roughly from 323 to 31 BC, counted several
major libraries, the best known and probably the greatest being the Library of Alexandria, founded in 300 BC.
It was severely damaged by Julius Caesar’s fire in 48 BC and was finally destroyed at some time between 270 and
275 AD during the attack of Emperor
Aurelius. Next in order was the Library of Pergamon, with some 200,000 volumes, which Marc Anthony “generously” gave to his wife, Queen Cleopatra. The
Roman Empire created its own libraries in Rome ,
often apparently located in separate buildings containing Greek and
Latin works. We possess a catalog listing all the facilities of Rome from
circa 350 AD in which no less than 29 public libraries are mentioned!
It is clear that since Hellenistic times many
people were literate and could fluently read either or both Greek and Latin
texts. What a shame that so much knowledge and such linguistic skills have been lost
since then!
In an article published in the BBC News
Magazine, Robert Fowler, Professor of Classic at the University of Bristol, was so
kind as to compose a list of the main lost works from antiquity:
Aeschylus - only 7 of his 80
plays survive
Aristophanes - 11 out of 40 plays
survive
Ennius - his epic poem
Annales, is almost entirely lost
Euripides - 18 of his 90 plays
survive
Livy - three-quarters of his
History of Rome is lost
Sappho - most of her nine
books of lyric poems are lost
Sophocles - only 7 entire plays
survive of the 120 he wrote
New and more in-depth excavations in
[Picture of the Getty Villa is from their site - click here]
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