News from Herculaneum

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Qimmik
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News from Herculaneum

Post by Qimmik »

In today's New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/21/scien ... -news&_r=0

Science journalism tends to get things wrong, but if this pans out it could be good news. I recall reading that the Italian government has opposed further excavation of the Villa dei papiri, though.

The end of the article seems wrong. Vergil's text is based primarily on mss from late antiquity, not medieval mss, and is as secure as any ancient text. What I'd really like to see, more than almost any other Latin author, is an early text of Propertius, whose text today is in truly deplorable shape. More Livy would be nice, too. Tacitus was too late to make it into a library at Herculaneum, of course.

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Re: News from Herculaneum

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Nice. It looks like they doing some sort of beam spectroscopy, and digitally modeling the location of the ink deposits, which I imagine would have neat chemical markers, like trace metals, etc. Figuring out the exact depth of letters seems to be the real challenge. But they mention that Seales' earlier research modeled the new shape of the carbonized papyrus surface. And projecting a 3D surface to the flat 2D original surface is second-nature for physicists. I would be very surprised if they don't already have some initial results.
“One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato." "In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The German scholars have improved Greek so much.”

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Paul Derouda
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Re: News from Herculaneum

Post by Paul Derouda »

Nice indeed. I hope there are still carbonized scrolls of real interest. I hear that many of these were lost back in the time when people who discovered them didn't know them for what they were, or thought they would never yield anything. As far as the technology is concerned, I suppose it's pretty similar to the ones used in medical imaging, so we're likely to see a lot of progress. The bigger question is whether we'll have anyone who knows enough Greek in a couple of decades when we'll really have the technology...

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Re: News from Herculaneum

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Good info here: http://www.herculaneum.ox.ac.uk/?q=Home%20Introduction

I recall a few more articles on this stuff in the pop press before, the Guardian in December?

I wouldn't worry about people being around to read this stuff in the future, the percentage of people who know the language inside out to a ridiculous degree will always be somewhat stable and is actually rather large considering. It's just that papyrologists remain a merry few. Even amongst Classicist's it's seen as a) a necessity by most and b) "nerdy" (I know, don't laugh). That said I do think the older hands know some cool as hell stuff, I mean Parsons for example is just so fascinating to talk to.

I do think by far the coolest thing about this project is what it tells us about the language and the revelation of sort of...behind the scenes texts, things like language treatises. Try as I might I really can't get excited over Philodemos and his ilk.
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jeidsath
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Re: News from Herculaneum

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The Nature letter is very interesting. There are some pictures.
While our first experiments have revealed only small segments of writing and are in need of further refinement, we note that once the XPCT technique has been tuned, the imaging of an entire papyrus scroll should not require more than a few hours of synchrotron beam time that can be obtained by way of a peer-reviewed process.
It looks like there will be enough shortly to make a new generation of papyrologist's eyes go bad, staring at the PDFs.
“One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato." "In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The German scholars have improved Greek so much.”

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Re: News from Herculaneum

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Re: News from Herculaneum

Post by daivid »

Another interesting but depressing report from January this year:
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015 ... erculaneum

I say depressing because if progress is still a snail's pace letter by letter I will be dead before they can publish a Greek text that I would be able to read.

And don't get too hopeful about the Synchrotron -it doesn't seem to have got beyond the proof of concept phase:
https://www.researchitaly.it/en/underst ... ron-light/
λονδον

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Re: News from Herculaneum

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First results (from the algorithms, if not from Herculaneum):

http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/9/e1601247

I expect them to do the same with a Herculaneum scroll very soon.
“One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato." "In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The German scholars have improved Greek so much.”

Joel Eidsath -- jeidsath@gmail.com

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