Technology

The Herculaneum Papyrus has been deciphered as being burned during the eruption of Vesuvius

A roll of papyrus from Herculaneum, carbonized during the eruption of Vesuvius, and preserved at the Institut de France, being scanned by X-ray.
Courtesy of Mage Digital Re

Descriptive – Thanks to an international competition, young researchers managed to read a 2000-year-old text.

It is a text that talks about music, fun and capers! This roll of papyrus was literally cooked at over 320 degrees Celsius 2000 years ago, when flows of mud and volcanic material descended from Vesuvius to cover the cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii (79 AD). The pages were welded together and their contents were supposed to be lost forever. But the international competition made it possible to achieve the huge feat of understanding and reading hundreds of words spread over more than 15 columns.

Between 1752 and 1754, a papyrus scroll, discovered with a hundred other manuscripts, and since called the “Villa of the Papyri”, in a magnificent Roman villa in Herculaneum belonging to Calpurnius Pison Cassoninus, father-in-law of Julius Caesar. Preserved in the libraries of the Institut de France in Paris. It was offered with five other scrolls by Napoleon Bonaparte, who received them as a gift from the King of Naples in 1802. Manuscript…

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