If the scientists are right, we are on the verge of an epoch-making discovery.
It seems we now have the technology to deny the catastrophic damage caused to these fragile papyri – almost 2,000 years ago – by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
And if we can read these 1,800 poorly roasted scrolls, we may be about to reveal some of literature’s greatest lost masterpieces.
Therefore, we are trembling on the threshold of a treasure that may be more golden than that of Tutankhamun or that of any other pharaoh.
We may be about to uncork some truly rich harvests, works of poetry, drama, philosophy and mathematics that have been lost for thousands of years.
I do not believe that there is a single reader of this great, cultured and civilized newspaper, who can remain indifferent to what is at stake.
A fragment of a Herculaneum scroll shows the marks in the fragile material.
A fragile Herculaneum scroll: part of a 2,000-year-old pair charred and preserved in cylinders crumpled and blackened by the eruption of Vesuvius
They made us friends. It was Greece and Rome – the classical world – who laid the foundations of our modern world.
You are reading these words in a semi-Latin language; You live in a democracy, whose founding idea was born in Greece.
Your home, large or small, will be filled with cornices, pediments, architraves, and other barely-noticed legacies from the classical canon of architecture.
You see multi-episode television revenge plots and family psychodramas that have their origins in the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
Wherever you live in the West – in Europe, America or Australasia – you are a cultural and intellectual descendant of Greece and Rome, whether you recognize it or not; and that’s because it was those great cultures that inspired the Renaissance, literally the rebirth of the ancient world.
It was the Renaissance that led to the Enlightenment and the political, commercial and technological rise of the modern West, whether we are talking about the G7 or the OECD countries that still represent the majority of the wealth and innovative power of the humanity.
That sequence was itself a kind of miracle, because there was a terrible interruption between the ancient world and the Renaissance.
They called it the Middle Ages, which followed the fall of Rome; and in that Middle Ages, the legacy of Greek and Roman cultures was about to be lost. The Renaissance only occurred because there was a sudden resurgence of interest, beginning in Italy, in the thought and writings of the ancient world.
They began to unearth the texts – moldy and moth-eaten – that had practically been lost in European memory. They rummaged through the monastery libraries. The crusaders brought them from Byzantium, where the monks had preserved them.
Slowly, they were translated and disseminated, and in England those texts became the basis of our Elizabethan or early modern culture.
Shakespeare himself enjoys the great feast of Plutarch, Ovid and others, and without his knowledge of the classics he might have been great, but he would not have been the Shakespeare we know.
And even Shakespeare, relatively erudite as he was, only had access to a small fraction of the corpus of Greek and Latin literature, because much of it had already been destroyed. From time to time over the past several hundred years, we have recovered some fragments, such as the fragments of poetry on the back of laundry lists, preserved in the dry sands of Egypt. But the gaps persist and are painfully huge.
Take Sappho, the lesbian in love with Lesbos, for example. She was so famous in the ancient world and so revered that she was called the tenth Muse; and what we have is really very beautiful.
But we only have one complete poem by Sappho; and as for those more recent fragments from Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, they are so full of brackets (where words are missing) that it is sometimes difficult to tell whether he is desiring a boy or a girl (it is usually a girl).
Or take Aeschylus. Only a handful of his 90 works survive, but the influence of what we have has been colossal. Seven Against Thebes has inspired everything from the Seven Samurai to the Magnificent Seven to the music of The Clash.
What if we found his other 80 plays, or Homer’s supposedly obscene Margites, or Aristotle in Comedy? Many things have just disappeared, many things that could change our view of the ancient world.
So when we hear about a vast library of texts waiting to be unlocked, the excitement is enormous because it is amazing that we have this library.
A conservator displays a Herculaneum Papyrus, charred by the eruption of Vesuvius at the National Library in Naples
At the end of August of the year 79 AD. C., the pyroclastic* The surge from the erupting Vesuvius engulfed the elegant resorts of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and as the superheated volcanic matter roared down the slope, it vitrified the brains of the people in its path and froze them in its death throes.
And yet, when it came to a huge seaside villa in Herculaneum (which may have belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, Calpurnius Piso), something extraordinary happened.
The library had been packed up in the hopes that it could escape the lava, but it was too late. The scrolls were not incinerated because there was no oxygen to burn them.
Instead, they quickly fried them into blackened, shriveled cylinders. In the centuries since their discovery, there have been disastrous attempts to open them, and each time the charred remains have been left crumpled illegibly.
However, in recent months we have made great progress. Using the particle accelerator at Harwell in Oxford to locate the minerals in the ink, and using AI to determine which letters these inkblots should form, the researchers were able to read 5 percent of a scroll that is not only unopened, but that cannot be opened.
They have found gold. It is clearly a work of Epicurean philosophy and of great potential interest. But we need to read more about this, and the process is currently laborious and expensive.
These rolls may be only ten to 20 cm wide, but can be up to 15 m long. They cost a fortune to bring to Harwell and, at current prices, will cost more than £1 million for each of the 1,800 rolls, not to mention the others that can still be found in the village.
Well, there is nothing to do, nor a better investment for the world.
Now that we can read them, we must read them. When we look at these charred pieces of trash, we are looking at the literary foundations of our entire society.
Have we become so ignorant of our history, so apathetic, that we can just let this go?
The technology is constantly improving and the cost will begin to go down. But it’s still a trifle** for Western governments or a technology tycoon.
Now we can discover not only lost glories, but also glories we never knew existed. We owe it to our posterity to decipher those scrolls.
Dictionary Corner
*Pyroclastic: Relating to, consisting of, or denoting fragments of rock erupted by a volcano
**Trifle: Something that is considered too unimportant or easy to merit much consideration.