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Related: About this forumWe Might Finally Be Able to Read Ancient Scrolls Damaged By Vesuvius Eruption
The Herculaneum papyri were carbonised into fragile blocks (pictured)
X-rays are revealing the lettering and ink for the first time in 2,000 years. It suggests metal ink was used centuries earlier than was initially believed
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3503046/Peeling-layers-Herculaneum-scrolls-reveals-papyri-ink-contained-METAL-centuries-earlier-thought.html#ixzz43epsalEu
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We Might Finally Be Able to Read Ancient Scrolls Damaged By Vesuvius Eruption
Image: Emmanuel Brun
They were discovered centuries ago, but are too delicate to be unrolled. Generations of historians and archaeologists pined over them. Now scientists from the Italian National Research Council believe theyve found an aspect of the scrolls that may make them readable.
Everyone thought that the people of Herculaneum, and other ancient societies, wrote with carbon-based ink. Though eventually metallic inks made their way into the mix, it was assumed that this happened well after 79 AD. But when the scientists took fragments of the scrolls to Grenoble, France and put them in a particle accelerator, the technique revealed quite a lot of lead in the ink. http://gizmodo.com/we-might-finally-be-able-to-read-ancient-scrolls-damage-1766252879
LongTomH
(8,636 posts)I, Hadrian, say that we can stop illegal Pictish immigration into this great land by building a wall across Britannia. I will even make the Picts pay for it! - Paid for by the Rome for the Romans Committee
Why everyone be hatin on the Picts; the Celts, the Romans, the Brits...
jtuck004
(15,882 posts)And, as they said, they didn't pay one sheep toward the cost.
Raster
(20,998 posts)Igel
(35,293 posts)It was a Pict-o-gram.
elljay
(1,178 posts)say "Romanes eunt domus"?
jtuck004
(15,882 posts)happyslug
(14,779 posts)One reason for this conclusion was when the area around the wall were studied anti personnel devices were found SOUTH of the wall not north of the wall. That indicates a fear of people leaving not entering. The area around the wall was more like the area around the Berlin Wall, no concern to the area outside the wall (and graffiti all over that side of the wall) but rigid correctness on the side where the East Germans or Romans were located. Thus Hadrian's wall appears to be a wall like the Berlin Wall, to keep people in.
Please note you do not build a solid wall to stop an invasion. Instead you hold on to choke points an invader has to go through. This what both England and Scotland did in the middle ages when they were two independent countries. Neither country tried to use Hadrian's wall, it was to wide to defend with enough troops to actually stop an invasion. Instead, once an army crossed the border, which was Hadrian's wall, they reacted to the threat. In England by reinforcing York, In Scotland by reinforcing Sterling or Inverness. Sterling and York were on the main road so taking them was essential to any invasion. Hadrian's wall never factored into any invasion of England or Scotland.
annabanana
(52,791 posts)can discern!
eggplant
(3,911 posts)Future generations will note just how forward thinking we were to add so much lead to Flint's water supply.
Cal33
(7,018 posts)SoapBox
(18,791 posts)Riley was Here!
edbermac
(15,936 posts)Experts still divided on what was more lethal, the food or the volcano.
Uncle Joe
(58,338 posts)Thanks for the thread, tencats.
tencats
(567 posts)If interested be sure to read the article that appeared in the New Yorker magazine. Describes the efforts made in the past to read these ancient scrolls, a process that over the centuries resulted in the destruction of scrolls. Now there is new hope that using the current advancements in technology that soon scientist scholars can begin the unraveling the Herculaneum papyri. Surprisingly many more Papiri await to be unearthed.
The Invisible Library
Can digital technology make the Herculaneum scrolls legible after two thousand years?
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/16/the-invisible-library
Mocella accompanied me on my visit to the Villa dei Papiri. Giuseppe Farella, who works for the Soprintendenza, the regional archeological agency, which oversees the site, took us inside the locked gates and led us into some of the old tunnels made by the Bourbon cavamonti in the seventeen-fifties. We used the lights on our phones to guide us through a smooth, low passageway. An occasional face emerged from the faint wall frescoes. Then we came to the end.
Just beyond is the library, Farella assured us, the room where Philodemus books were found. Presumably, the main library, if one exists, would be near that, within easy reach.
But for the foreseeable future there will be no more excavations of the villa or the town. Politically, the age of excavation ended in the nineties. Leslie Rainer, a wall-painting conservator and a senior project specialist with the Getty Conservation Institute, who met me in the Casa del Bicentenario, one of the best-preserved structures in Herculaneum, said, I am not sure excavations will ever be opened again. Not in our lifetime. She pointed to the paintings on the walls, which the G.C.I.s team is in the process of recording digitally. The colors, originally vibrant yellows, had turned red as a result of the heat from the volcanos eruption. Since being uncovered, the painted architectural details have been deterioratingthe paint is flaking and powdering from exposure to the fluctuating temperature and humidity. Rainers project analyzes how this happens.
Richard Janko, of the University of Michigan, argues that books are a special case, archeologically, and should be excavated regardless. Books are a different kind of artifact, he said. You can gain knowledge of a whole way of life through a single book. They are designed to carry information across the centuries. If we wait until the volcano erupts again, he warns, they could be lost forever. Vesuvius, which has erupted scores of times since A.D. 79 and is still one of the most dangerous volcanoes on earth, has been quiet since 1944.
eppur_se_muova
(36,257 posts)Stupid scripts everywhere !
tencats
(567 posts)I know I know, mine too but the have the best pics.
I started here: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35865470
Ancient scrolls give up their secrets:
And here:
http://phys.org/news/2016-03-ink-scrolls-eruption-mount-vesuvius.html:
Lead found in ink used to write scrolls buried by eruption of Mount Vesuvius
Javaman
(62,510 posts)"ground shaking, getting really hot, stuff falling from sky...must bake bread".
MisterP
(23,730 posts)matt819
(10,749 posts)that volcano sure looks . . .
Beartracks
(12,806 posts)Down in the comments section, someone quotes a description of one scroll, from a New Yorker Magazine article:
"Swaddled in thick cotton was what appeared to be a human turd."
Califonz
(465 posts)The Romans sweetened wine with lead acetate, which might explain the lead content of the ink.
marble falls
(57,063 posts)valerief
(53,235 posts)Warren Stupidity
(48,181 posts)Almost all of the ancient texts we have are iterated copies from centuries after the original. Many texts have no extant copies and are known only by citation in texts we do have. Religious institutions were doing almost all of the replication of pre-Christian texts of the documents we do have, and they edited and modified and cherry picked what they preserved to suit their agenda.