The scroll of the history of Plato’s Academy written on a 2,000-year-old papyrus has revealed its last secrets. Applying modern imagining technology, scholars found out that the papyrus had writing also on the back.
The scroll is one of more than 1,800 papyri found in the Herculaneum Villa of the Papyri, in the 18th century, carbonized by the eruption of Vesuvius volcano in 79 AD. It is the same eruption that buried the Pompeii.
The papyri, containing a number of Greek philosophical texts, come from the only surviving library from antiquity that exists in its entirety. Most of the works discovered are associated with the Epicurean philosopher and poet Philodemus of Gadara.
More than 200 years ago, scholars glued the remains of an ancient papyrus scroll onto cardboard to preserve it. But the scroll, a history of Plato’s Academy, also had writing on the back. Now scholars have deployed imaging technology to read what’s been concealed.
The scroll is blackened and in tatters.
But the same processes that charred the scroll and the rest of that library also preserved it, according to papyrus scholar Graziano Ranocchia from the Italian National Research Council. “Unless Vesuvius erupted, they would never have survived,” he says.
The scroll was discovered and painstakingly unrolled in 1795. It’s unusual among Herculaneum scrolls because it has writing in Greek on the front and back. To preserve the fragments, scholars glued them to cardboard. But since then, only one side has been visible.
The scroll is a rough draft of a history of the academy founded by the philosopher Plato — written by another philosopher, Philodemus, who lived during the first century B.C.
The research team used a technique called shortwave-infrared hyperspectral imaging to finally see some of what’s concealed on the back. The paper was published in Science Advances on Friday.
What scholars found are bits of text that Philodemus wanted to insert into his book, such as quotes from other sources he was considering using in the history. Classicist Kilian Fleischer from the University of Würzburg, who is putting together a new edition of Philodemus’ history using these images, says it provides a unique view of an ancient philosopher’s writing process.
“We have here more or less the only case where we can really see how an ancient author worked and composed his book,” Fleischer says. “We can see he made notes — insert this later, insert this and this, and skip this and this for the final version and so on.”
He says their research also had an interesting byproduct — it made it much easier to read the front of the scroll by enhancing the contrast.
The scholars have been able to read more than 150 new words from the front of the papyrus. And in a book made up of fragments, Fleischer says that every letter counts.
“Sometimes you need just one letter in order to reconstruct a whole word, or in our case, a whole period, a whole clause, a whole sentence,” Fleischer adds.
They were also able to identify places where the text was misread before. For example, scholars had previously read the Greek word for “charmed.” But the new imaging showed it actually said “enslaved.”
Fleischer also says that the text calls into doubt certain historical details about Plato — for example, it suggests that he was enslaved at an earlier date than previously believed.
Without the hyperspectral imagining scholars would not be able to read the papyrus.
Full story in npr
