Lord Carnarvon's anxious question and Howard
Carter's breathless reply 'struck dumb with amazement', on viewing
Tutankhamun's tomb after some 3,500 years.
the candle flame [flickers], but presently, as my eyes
grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged
slowly from the mist
The
Daily Telegraph
reports:
Scientists have discovered new ways to read 1,800
charred manuscript scrolls already found in the ruins of the
so-called Villa of Papyri at Herculaneum, a city that,
like neighbouring Pompeii, was buried in volcanic matter when
Vesuvius erupted in AD79.
Scholars are convinced that many more scrolls lie awaiting
discovery there, among which are probably lost books by great
authors such as Aristotle and Livy.
...
The huge Villa of the Papyri, which belonged to Julius Caesar's
father-in-law, extended for 250 yards along the shore. "It must be
possible that a family capable of owning such a villa also
possessed a copy of Livy's History of Rome, of which more than 100
of the original 142 books are missing," says the writer Robert
Harris, author of the best-seller Pompeii.
"It appears that slaves had been trying to carry crates of books to
safety when they were overwhelmed by the eruption," he says. "There
may be lost plays by Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus, or even
the lost dialogues of Aristotle."
...
One reason for thinking that lost works by Aristotle lie beneath
the volcanic layers is that the hundreds of papyri already studied
almost certainly belonged to Philodemus (110-35BC), a philosopher
engaged in opposing Aristotle's poetic theory.
The Herculaneum Society meeting gasped like spectators at a
firework display when Nigel Wilson, of Lincoln College, Oxford,
showed a slide of a blackened roll of papyrus on which no writing
could be seen, and then showed what it looked like after
multi-spectral digital imaging had been used on it. Clear lines of
ancient Greek script appeared, like invisible ink held before the
fire.
The article sets forth some of the arguments pro and con for
immediate excavation. (Nice that the
Daily Telegraph still
uses BC and AD.)
HT to
January
17, 2005: In Search of Lost Aristotle Manuscripts at Pompeii at
Rare Book News.