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00:06In the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, a library of ancient scrolls is preserved when it is
00:12burned and buried by the volcanic eruption of 79 A.D.
00:16The volcano gave us the papyri, that's certain.
00:20The only library ever recovered from antiquity comes to light in a new day.
00:25The fact that they found 1,800 rolls of papyri from one villain in Herculaneum is absolutely staggering.
00:34From within these charred pages, scholars hope to recapture life in the days of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
00:41It is a race against time and deterioration.
00:44We're losing pieces of all the time.
00:47250 years after the scrolls were found, can new technologies help to read the blackened pages?
00:54We have the application of space-age technology to texts that have not been available for 2,000 years.
01:00And is there another library still buried at Herculaneum?
01:28At the National Library in Naples, Italy, scholars read from the pages of history's most fragile ancient
01:34library, scraps of papyrus transported through time by an unlikely set of circumstances.
01:41The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. burned and buried nearly 2,000 papyrus rolls.
01:49The carbonization preserved the scrolls when they would have otherwise turned to dust.
01:54So this whole process preserved them for us.
01:57If they hadn't been burnt in this way, then they would have just rotted away.
02:01I am a friend of Vesuvius because Vesuvius, with the eruption of 79 A.D., has conserved this papyri.
02:16More than two centuries after they were first discovered, many scrolls have yet to be unrolled or read.
02:22Only from the filler of papyri do we find these entire rolls.
02:27The problem is we don't know fully how to unroll them when they're completely carbonized and blackened.
02:34From more than 10,000 scattered and charred fragments, scholars work to recover the lost writings of classical philosophers
02:41and new perspectives on two ancient cities silenced by Vesuvius.
02:51In the ancient world, the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum reach their peak in the thriving Roman Empire.
02:58Both cities are located between the Bay of Naples and the fertile foot of Mount Vesuvius.
03:03Their archaeological remains provide a rare glimpse into the lives of both the rich and the commoner in the first
03:10century.
03:13One of the really significant things we get from Pompeii and Herculaneum is a pair of cities preserved in time,
03:23snapshots.
03:24So we learn exactly what the living conditions were like for people in the first century A.D.
03:32In Pompeii, you can see private houses very vividly, and I think people relate very closely to that
03:38because they can imagine what was life like for a family in antiquity.
03:42They were nice places, even the houses of bakers and fullers and people that we would think are quite lower
03:48middle class,
03:49who had been given a chance to enjoy themselves by the wonderful kind of first try at modern civilization that
03:56was the Roman Empire.
03:58While they are sister cities, Pompeii and Herculaneum have distinctive personalities.
04:05The larger city, Pompeii, is a busy commercial center.
04:13Herculaneum is located closer to Mount Vesuvius than is Pompeii.
04:17The pace of this seaside community is more subdued.
04:22It is one of the most beautiful towns on the Bay of Naples.
04:26Herculaneum was very different from Pompeii.
04:29It was a seaside town, it was something of a port therefore, but it always had a somewhat more cultured
04:37air to it.
04:38It was in touch with the intellectual life of the day to a greater extent than Pompeii was.
04:45Herculaneum is a very small city, but also a very refined one, especially regarding the villas.
04:50And consequently, at Herculaneum, we see houses, pictures and sculptures that are more beautiful and rich than those that we
04:58see at Pompeii.
05:00Many of Rome's rich and powerful citizens have properties here.
05:05One spectacular villa is owned by Julius Caesar's father-in-law, a politician named Lucius Calpurnius Piso.
05:13He was consul in 58 BC. That's the most powerful position that you can have in Rome.
05:19It's clear that whoever owned the villa was the most powerful person around.
05:23From the veranda of this seaside villa, the wealthy Piso family could gaze across the Bay of Naples and enjoy
05:30a life of wealth and privilege.
05:32It's hard to realize how far above the life of the common people the great Roman nobility were raised in
05:39what was already this incredibly rich empire.
05:42Unless maybe you were to refer to such unheard of modern billionaire as Bill Gates.
05:47To judge by the decorations in the villa, he would have been extremely wealthy.
05:52And we must remember that this was his holiday home.
05:56Two thousand years later, this collection of papyri would be the only known library to survive from antiquity.
06:03And the scrolls would miraculously endure one of the greatest natural disasters ever recorded.
06:09The eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
06:25The horror of an August day in 79 AD is forever etched in the faces of the victims of Vesuvius.
06:37As a volcano explodes around midday, a witness records the scene as a dark cloud of ash stretches across the
06:45sky.
06:46And Pliny observed this strange mottled cloud and this was the start of the eruption.
06:53Archeology shows us what was actually going on in the cities at the foot of Vesuvius.
06:59And there it was absolutely dire.
07:02In the town of Pompeii, the town was being covered by ash and pumice.
07:07You can reconstruct in minute by minute detail their deaths, which were absolutely horrific.
07:12There is this long rain.
07:16The rain comes down of the Lepilli for at least 12 hours.
07:20It must be very choking, but it doesn't actually kill people.
07:25And they're all trying to find strategies for survival.
07:29Some of them get out of the city, some of them hide.
07:31People were choking and so on, but they were mostly able to escape.
07:36It was only the greedy ones who wanted to go back for their money and their valuables who tended to
07:42succumb.
07:42Because of their locations, the victims of Pompeii and Herculaneum meet very different ends.
07:49Pompeii is blanketed with falling ash.
07:52The ash conforms perfectly to its victims, preserving a nightmarish imprint of their deaths.
07:59Herculaneum's victims are enveloped by a cloud of gas, then skeletonized by a flow of hot mud.
08:05At a certain point, the volcano released a cloud of superheated gas and steam, which the volcanologists call a pyroclastic
08:16flow.
08:17This terribly hot mud mixed with gas, heated to around 325 degrees Celsius, that's three times above boiling point,
08:26came down and overwhelmed everything in Herculaneum, burying it in a depth probably of 70 feet.
08:36For many years, it was thought that all of Herculaneum's residents had escaped.
08:40But in the 1980s, hundreds of skeletons were found clustered near the shore.
08:45Certainly, people were trying to escape from Herculaneum by boat.
08:49Near the shoreline, hundreds of skeletons were found.
08:53So they didn't get out quickly enough.
08:56And then came the pyroclastic flow, and there's no getting away from that.
09:02It must have been a terrible end.
09:07The city of Herculaneum would remain buried for 1700 years,
09:12its location forgotten as the modern city of Herculano is built above the site.
09:17But in 1709, a chance discovery reveals this perfectly preserved ancient city buried under volcanic material.
09:26The original discovery of the town of Herculaneum was made when someone was digging a well.
09:32They dug a well, and at the bottom there was a statue.
09:36So this encouraged excavation, and it was done by tunneling.
09:41The tunnels they were working in were only wide enough for one person, and just tall enough to walk under.
09:50They're following like moles, these deep trenches along the foundations of the ancient buildings,
09:55and extracting sculpture and other precious items as they go.
10:02By today's standards, the first excavations are not very scientific.
10:06Workers tunnel into the city and hunt for precious objects.
10:10The immediate object of the excavations really was a treasure hunt.
10:15Charles of Bourbon was most interested in the kinds of materials that he would then come to display in the
10:21Royal Museum.
10:22The finds from Herculaneum would fill the Royal Museums.
10:25The discoveries here, and later at Pompeii, would attract international attention,
10:31and turn Naples into a prime tourist destination.
10:34People were realizing that these were some fundamental places that showed how the ancients lived.
10:42This large, first-hand discovery of an entire city really brought it home to people.
10:49The archaeological discoveries would have long-lasting impact on art and culture worldwide.
10:53But no find would attract more attention than the villa owned by Lucius Calpurnius Piso.
11:00The Villa dei Papiri turned out to have an extraordinary treasure trove of bronze sculpture and marble sculpture.
11:11There's never been another Roman villa discovered that had a comparable amount of sculptural decoration.
11:19Archaeologist Karl Weber would create this floor plan drawing of the villa in 1754, even though the structure itself is
11:26still buried.
11:27He describes the vast estate as the most valuable and richest villa in the ancient world.
11:33But the single most unique discovery from Piso's villa was almost overlooked.
11:371,800 carbonized papyrus rolls are at first mistaken for charcoal.
11:43In 1752, they were working in the villa of the papyri and discovered these very mysterious objects which appeared to
11:51be lumps of coal.
11:54They did not realize these were papyri.
11:57This is understandable because the concept of a papyrus did not exist.
12:02They saw what looked like carbonized tree branches.
12:06We even know that the first three or four papyri were burned for heat.
12:12At first, it seems a number of them were thrown away or used perhaps as fuel on the fire.
12:19But at some point, somebody realized that there was writing on the insides of these lumps and they understood that
12:27they were books.
12:28The fact that they found 1,800 rolls of papyri from one villa in Herculaneum is absolutely staggering.
12:39And of course, one of our great frustrations is that we cannot get back to ancient libraries.
12:44We can get back to medieval libraries because medieval documents survive.
12:50But everything from antiquity has been burnt, destroyed.
12:55The excavation supervisor notes that hundreds of scrolls are found scattered throughout the villa.
13:02He talks about bringing up a huge load of them, even too huge to carry himself.
13:09He describes their natures as they're like lumps of charcoal.
13:15Oxford scholar Dirk Obig says that the scrolls not only survived the heat of the Vesuvius eruption,
13:21they also were subjected to rain and other forces.
13:25Well, these are papyrus rolls that they look just like they looked when they were dug out of the ground
13:32in 1752.
13:33When they were first mistaken for lumps of coal, they'd been smashed by the pressure of the volcanic rubble that
13:42lay on top of them.
13:43They also got wet in the rains that turned the ash into mud that filled the buildings,
13:50which made them shrink around the edges, producing a trapezoidal shape of the papyrus rather than a round cylinder.
13:59The discovery of the library at Herculaneum would attract international attention and anticipation.
14:04The news of this incredible discovery made its way around the learned centers of Europe very, very quickly.
14:12And so people had great hopes that you might find lost tragedies of the great playwrights of Greece.
14:17This was our first chance to reach directly into antiquity and try to pull something out.
14:22In Naples, King Carlos sees the scrolls as a way to boost his prestige internationally.
14:27It was good for the king's public image to have such a treasure in his own kingdom.
14:32Anybody who came to Naples after that time wanted to know, what's with the papyri?
14:36Can we see them? What have you learned from them? How many have been unrolled?
14:41But for all their promise and possibility, there is one serious problem.
14:45The carbonized scrolls are so fragile that they are nearly impossible to unroll.
14:51It would be years before the king's staff would successfully unroll even one.
14:58In the 18th century, the question of how to unroll the Herculaneum papyri presents a unique challenge for curators.
15:05These things were very difficult to unroll, and the first procedure that was followed was adopted by Camillo Paderni,
15:13a painter from Rome who had a very undistinguished background as far as antiquities were concerned.
15:20Paderni had a sort of rough-and-ready way of opening up papyri.
15:25That is, he took a knife to them.
15:27And one way which we know that he used was simply to take a large knife and cut through the
15:34papyrus rolls lengthwise,
15:36to cut them into two halves.
15:38You would then get two halves like this, wouldn't you?
15:41And he would expose layers of writing on the inside, running across, in fact, scraping off the damaged layers.
15:51And he crushed all the material in the middle, and then he just emptied that out onto his workbench,
15:57and he would continue doing that until he had got closer to the external part of the papyrus,
16:03and on that layer he could read a certain amount of continuous text.
16:06That is to say, he could see a certain number of letters which seemed to follow one after the other,
16:11because he couldn't actually read Greek.
16:13Paderni was an ignorant brute.
16:15I think that's very clear.
16:18But he has the glory of having invented the technique of sawing them in half.
16:22As we're told, Paderni took for his butchery the best preserved papyri.
16:28It's really just incalculable to say what we will have lost.
16:32Visiting scientists, including the Prince of San Severo, come to Naples to test their own theories about unrolling the scrolls.
16:39This person thought that liquid mercury, because it seems so slippery and doesn't seem to move with friction through anything,
16:46would be able to slip in between the rolls of the papyrus and would therefore separate them cleanly.
16:52So he constructed a big box into which a papyrus roll was stood on its end,
16:58and he then filled the box from the top with liquid mercury.
17:03Well, this seemed like a good idea at the time, but when they opened up the box again,
17:08all they found was that the density of the mercury had simply pulverized this papyri.
17:13There was nothing left but powder.
17:14There were other attempts made to unroll the papyri as well, often using chemical solvents.
17:20And the worst was Sir Humphrey Davy, the greatest chemist in England,
17:23who was absolutely sure that he was going to find some chemical compound that wouldn't reduce them to dust,
17:28and got as far as finding one that only broke them into fragments.
17:34He was even allowed to go to Naples in the 1820s and try his experiments,
17:37and after he had reduced about 12 more scrolls, the fragments gave up.
17:40Facing criticism from all of Europe, the king eventually enlists help from the Vatican,
17:46which responds by sending a trained conservator to Naples.
17:50But Poderni does not welcome Antonio Piaggio's arrival.
17:53Piaggio basically thought that Poderni was a butcher.
17:57He kept talking about the slaughter that he had inflicted on these papyri.
18:01Father Piaggio was much more careful, much more sophisticated in his approach,
18:07and he was the one who devised the unrolling machine with which they could finally begin to unroll these works.
18:17The method was that you pasted a sort of very fine animal membrane on the back of the papyri,
18:25and then very, very gently separate the layer off.
18:28That membrane serves to hold the papyrus together as it sort of crumbles away from the rest of the scroll,
18:35and is rolled upward.
18:37Once a strip of papyrus of some length is acquired,
18:42then the person running the machine comes with a very sharp knife and cuts that piece off,
18:47lays it flat, and allows it to dry.
18:50It's a very painstaking process because you had to continually find ways of supporting this papyrus
18:58so that it wouldn't disintegrate as it came off the roll.
19:01You had to find the leading edge of the papyrus, which was by no means an easy kind of thing
19:06to do.
19:07The method of unrolling the scrolls is very slow, painstaking work.
19:11The first papyrus, which was unrolled, took four years to unroll, proceeding at a rate of millimeters per day.
19:18By the end of the century, only a handful of scrolls have been unrolled.
19:22Despite the slow pace of the work, the scrolls are a form of political currency for the Neapolitan monarchy.
19:29There was no court, no individual aristocrat, I imagine,
19:34who didn't have some interest in finding out what was involved in those texts.
19:39The Queen of Naples, Caroline Murat, Napoleon Bonaparte's younger sister,
19:44would sometimes present scroll fragments as diplomatic gifts.
19:48Napoleon himself received several scrolls, which would later be unrolled and translated by French scholars.
19:54Through a series of sometimes strange trades, papyrus rolls would end up in Berlin, Copenhagen, and other European cities.
20:02One of the most interesting anecdotes told about the trafficking in Herculaneum papyri is the exchange,
20:12or we should say alleged exchange, of 18 kangaroos for 18 scrolls of papyrus.
20:19They were presented to the Prince Regent in the early 19th century by the King of Naples,
20:24and he gave 18 of these rolls to the Prince Regent.
20:29And in return, he received 18 fully grown kangaroos.
20:34So that's the exchange rate, one papyrus per kangaroo.
20:38Contemporary sources treat this incident as if it is, in fact, something rather scandalous.
20:45One of the sources includes the detail that the kangaroos were deformed, as if it somehow cheapens the deal.
20:53Eventually, several scrolls and an important set of drawings related to the papyri would end up at Oxford University.
21:01In 1802, the Prince of Wales sends the Reverend John Hayter to Naples to work on the scrolls.
21:08It was the biggest piece of luck these papyri ever had that this man came there,
21:13and he got fascinated with the technique of opening the papyri and opened up the five or six hundred scrolls
21:20that form the basis of our collection and our reading today.
21:24Hayter stayed there for a number of years, and the work proceeded much more rapidly under his care.
21:32Hayter makes careful drawings of each scroll fragment as it is opened.
21:35And in 1808, the army of Napoleon came, and the royal family fled.
21:40And Hayter fled with all his drawings he'd made.
21:43There was some sort of scandal, I think.
21:46He took with him the drawings which had been made, and they now reside in the Bodleian Museum at Oxford.
21:53Today, the Hayter facsimiles are an important resource for papyrologists
21:57because they document how the scrolls looked when they were first opened.
22:01And they're a principal resource for reconstructing the text because he saw lots of things that aren't there now.
22:08In the two centuries since the scrolls were found, no easy system has been developed for unrolling them.
22:14The most recent innovation, known as the Oslo method, uses special glues to stabilize the scroll fragments
22:21and minimize damage during unrolling.
22:24It involves applying a mixture of acetic acid and gelatin with brush strokes
22:29onto the outside of a scroll.
22:32And then, when that dries, it forms a very fragile but cohesive shell.
22:43When this shell comes off, the interior layer of that piece is revealed on which the text is recorded.
22:52The problem with doing that is, every time a little bit is peeled off, the papyrus breaks slightly,
23:00and you can see a break about every centimeter or so where they've pulled a little bit more off and
23:07then a little bit more off.
23:08It remains glued to the rice paper, but from a conservation point of view, you've actually destroyed a bit of
23:16papyrus every time it breaks.
23:18And over a period of time, that's where the papyrus will wear.
23:24Those who work to read and publish the thousands of fragments now stored in Naples face unusual challenges making sense
23:31of the carbonized and crushed papyri.
23:34Well, I suppose they look like toast.
23:38They are brown, dark brown, bits of them are sort of grayish, very broken fragmentary surface.
23:45And then, against that, you can see a kind of shinier gray ink.
23:50That's what we're looking for, of course, is this ink.
23:53The surface is not at all flat.
23:55There are ridges in it which come from the papyrus having been rolled up and then squashed.
24:01It was like flattening out a potato chip.
24:05Papyrus is a little thicker than potato chips, but it's nearly as brittle.
24:08You can't sit at a table, put the papyrus flat on that table, look through the microscope and you'll see
24:14everything.
24:15You have to keep on moving it constantly, trying to get exactly the right angle at which the ink shows
24:22up.
24:22Sometimes what's happened is that part of one layer has come apart from the layer to which it belongs, and
24:29that piece of papyrus has become attached to the wrong layer.
24:32When this papyrus came and rolled, like many of the Herculanean papyri, the layers stuck to each other.
24:38And when you're reading the papyrus, sometimes, almost imperceptively, you find that you're reading text that belongs on a different
24:47part of the papyrus.
24:49And you can hardly even see that the layers have stuck to each other.
24:54A typical publication of a scroll fragment will be full of holes.
24:59Patient scholars work on an elaborate puzzle, trying to fill in text that others may have missed.
25:04One feels kind of desperate, having 75% or 35% of a text, but the conditions are such that
25:13you can't read at all.
25:14And this is what drives scholars on.
25:17I never think of this as a hideous work. It's almost addictive, really.
25:23What you find when you're in Naples reading the papyrus is that you're angry every time you have to leave
25:29the Officina because it's closing.
25:30After I've worked on the papyri all day, when I go to sleep, I will frequently have letters dancing in
25:38front of my eyes. There's no doubt of this.
25:40Despite the efforts of scholars over 250 years, some scrolls have revealed little or no text and have not been
25:47identified or published.
25:51In 1969, Professor Marcello Giganti launches a renewed international effort to read and publish the papyri.
25:58And from the very beginning, I wanted international collaboration.
26:06At a conference in 1999, Giganti meets an American team that is using new imaging technology to read burned manuscripts.
26:15He invites the team to Naples, but they are initially discouraged by the poor condition of the papyri.
26:21When I looked at them first, I thought, well, this is the destructive power of a volcano.
26:26They look in the worst shape of any papyri I've ever seen.
26:30When they arrive at the National Library, Steve and Susan Boris of Brigham Young University set out to see if
26:36the new technology,
26:37called multi-spectral imaging, can reveal any new text on the blackened papyri.
26:45They quickly determine that the technology makes it possible to isolate the text from the carbonized background.
26:53You've got black ink on black papyri.
26:57But each one of those have different reflective characteristics.
27:00While the eye sees black ink and black papyrus, multi-spectral imaging is based on reflectivity.
27:06Because the ink and the papyrus reflect light differently, they can be easily distinguished from each other,
27:12especially in the infrared spectrum.
27:15In the infrared region, we have a different set of responses.
27:19And so what we see as black paper may appear light gray in the infrared or red region,
27:24and the ink will appear black.
27:26And so we see now black on a gray background.
27:28We photograph that, and it's easy to read.
27:30Here we have a Scorsi fragment, which is an outer layer of a scroll.
27:37You can see evidence of the writing with the unaided eye.
27:41This fragment right now is being shown in a visible light filter.
27:46It's about 500 nanometers.
27:48There's really no evidence that there's writing at all.
27:50Now we're about 700 nanometers.
27:53Start the camera back up.
27:55Reduce the light.
27:56We're starting to see a little bit of text in here.
28:00I'm going to focus it again.
28:04We're now seeing an image with almost complete text in the infrared using a thousand nanometer filter,
28:10which before, the very first image, using visible filters, we were seeing virtually no text.
28:17Multi-spectral imaging was originally developed for the space program.
28:22NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory uses the technology to study the Earth and other planets.
28:27People at JPL have tried to determine what's on the surface of some of the planets on their flybys,
28:32and that gave rise to the idea that perhaps on a smaller scale we could now start to image some
28:38of these troublesome texts and archeological objects.
28:41In Naples, when word spreads about the new technology, skeptical papyrologists immediately bring the BYU team their most difficult fragments
28:49for study.
28:50I just told them, well, if you really can bring out new letters, I've got a challenging test case.
28:55There is a piece of papyrus, which Richard Janko and I worked over for an entire hour with the microscope,
29:02and all that is visible on it is blank surface plus remnants of two or three Greek letters.
29:09So, if you can do something with that one, I'll be very impressed.
29:14So, with fear and trembling, they took the piece of papyrus in, put it under the multiple imaging spectrum,
29:22started turning it up, and right in front of Geoffrey Fish's in my amazed eyes,
29:28every single letter on the papyrus sprang to life.
29:32Well, I thought he was going to have a stroke, but he was very excited.
29:36I actually moved out of the way, and he sat down at the screen.
29:40He maneuvered the text on the screen so he could see the full column of text.
29:43And I think he sat there for 10, 15, 20 minutes looking over that text for the very first time.
29:51Richard Janko had a similar experience with another fragment that had been very difficult to read.
29:57And suddenly, instead of three letters, there were 60 letters.
30:00We went back to the library to check this, to confirm these readings.
30:06I assumed that I would be able to confirm them.
30:09And after 10 minutes, we realized that we had the fragment upside down.
30:14And I realized also that we could never confirm these results with the human eye,
30:19because the human eye cannot see those wavelengths of light.
30:23These before and after images show what was visible to the human eye,
30:29and the text that is then revealed in the infrared spectrum.
30:37The letters are kind of leaping out of the papyrus in ways that we never imagined.
30:42And so we're getting new words, we're getting new letters, new thoughts, new readings.
30:48The multispectral images would allow for dramatic new readings.
30:51They would also allow for study of the papyri outside of Naples.
30:57So which filter is this one with?
31:00This filter was at 450 nanometers.
31:03So pretty much visible light?
31:05Visible light.
31:06Naked eye?
31:07Yeah.
31:08This image, which obviously is very striking, was taken with 1,000 nanometers.
31:13That's in the infrared.
31:16Now we've taken these two images and done a photographic printout.
31:20It really is amazing when you compare the 450 nanometer image with the 1,000 nanometer image.
31:28Here there really is almost nothing that can be read.
31:33And the Gigante doesn't rate it very high.
31:36In fact, 1491, non intero, poco legibile, so hardly or scarcely legible, and pessimo, in really bad shape.
31:48One of the interesting things is that it's cataloged among the papyri latini, when in fact it's obviously Greek.
31:56Here you have an entire word, sunteorontes.
32:01It's almost certainly a philosophical text.
32:03You can read complete sections of text essentially wherever it's not broken away.
32:09Here we've got a text that we can actually do something with and read.
32:13Is this worthy of publication?
32:15Definitely.
32:16This is the sort of thing that a papyrologist would be ecstatic about, getting a text in a condition this
32:23good.
32:24For scholars like Gigante, the new images will make it necessary to revise old readings and publications.
32:34This is papyrus number 1050 that I have been studying for many years, more than half a century.
32:43I should now make a new complete edition.
32:48I think that without doubt, the new photographic proceeding, that is an important contribution to the progress of our papyri.
33:07What is emerging from the scrolls today, with greater clarity than ever before, is a picture of Roman intellectual life
33:15in the first century.
33:16We have archaeological remains which can speak to us in a certain way, but they can't speak to us in
33:23quite the same way as those places which have left writings.
33:27There are certain kinds of questions that you cannot get answered from the mere material remains.
33:33We need to have what people wrote.
33:36This is the thing which gives us the best insight into their thinking, their way of lives, their highest thoughts
33:44and their highest aspirations.
33:47It is believed that the villa of the papyri where the scrolls were all found was home to a school
33:52of philosophy led by an Epicurean philosopher named Philodemus.
33:55His writings provide new insight into Epicurean beliefs.
33:59They are of incomparable value for anyone who is interested in Epicureanism.
34:03This is the urtext of Epicureanism.
34:06Here you have, for example, among the Epicureans, a group of people who were intelligent, who were responding to many
34:13of the same kinds of life pressures that we are,
34:17and who had a philosophy to which they were deeply committed, which tried to make them happy.
34:22While they are not considered religious texts, the philosophical scrolls do address some of the same questions posed by religion.
34:29Questions about gods, about a virtuous life, and about death.
34:33Epicureans saw that one of the ways in which you eliminate pain from your life is to eliminate fear, and
34:39in particular fear of death, fear of the afterlife.
34:43There is dispute about whether Epicureans literally believed in gods. I think that they did.
34:48But in any case, it's clear that those gods have nothing at all to do with us. They are not
34:51interested in us.
34:52They do not interfere in our lives for good or evil.
34:55It was a world in which most people worshipped the gods without believing in them.
34:59And the philosophers said, well, find your inner god and be tranquil in yourself, and reach out to friends who
35:06think the same way, and then you'll live as happy a life as can be lived.
35:14What has not been found in the scrolls so far is any reference to early religious movements, including Christianity.
35:20At the time of the eruption, many religions were active at Pompeii and Herculaneum.
35:25Christianity had begun to take root in the area.
35:28The Apostle Paul even visited the nearby city of Pozzuoli as a missionary, 30 years before the eruption of Vesuvius.
35:39So, at the time of Paul, a thriving congregation existed at Pozzuoli.
35:44It stopped there for many days.
35:46It would not be a great stretch to imagine that the Christians at Pozzuoli transferred their message to Pompeii, the
35:53city with the port nearest its own.
35:56A lot of people are kind of skeptical about Christianity having made it to Herculaneum by 79 A.D.
36:03I'm not at all.
36:04I think that ideas tend to move fast, especially, especially, especially very appealing ideas, very beautiful ideas.
36:14Although Christians were probably there at the time of the eruption, most scholars believe that the Herculaneum papyri are very
36:21unlikely to contain Christian references because of the age and ownership of the library.
36:27And the latest of the papyri in this library were written about 15 B.C.
36:31They were already, you know, quite old when the volcano blew up.
36:36But if you're expecting works comparable to the Christian Gospels, no, I don't think there would be anything like that.
36:44This was a philosophical library belonging to a member of the elite.
36:47Their influences would be Greek.
36:49They wouldn't be Jewish.
36:50They wouldn't be Christian.
36:52But because all of the scrolls have not been read, it is possible that other religious references may yet be
36:58found.
36:59What may still be hidden here is a subject of great speculation for scholars who, like their 18th century predecessors,
37:06hold out hope for new texts and more prominent authors.
37:11Well, people were aware, of course, that vast quantities of what might be considered the best of ancient literature had
37:17been lost.
37:18And so people had great hopes for this, that you might find lost tragedies of the great playwrights of Greece,
37:24or that you might find the lost books of the historian Livy, and that you would discover all the things
37:29that people had come to admire the remnants of in the Renaissance.
37:32People asked me, are we going to find some Aristotle?
37:35And I think it's very unlikely that we would find a full text of an Aristotle or a Plato.
37:40But the habit of the school was to read passages from other philosophers and discuss them.
37:46And consequently, it isn't impossible that we get big passages from greater philosophers still.
37:54The unread scrolls might also provide more literature by women, like the poet Sappho, whose writings rarely survive from antiquity.
38:02We have already some quotations of Sappho in some of the philosophical writings, but they're limited in extent.
38:09Rather little was written by women in antiquity, but we would be very lucky indeed to find their writings.
38:16This was something which most women did not have the leisure or the means or the education to do.
38:21Despite all that has been reclaimed from Vesuvius, there is a sense among scholars that the current collection is incomplete,
38:28that there may be something more, perhaps another entire library still buried at Herculaneum.
38:34I can't believe that there wasn't another library, another library with lost plays of Sophocles and Aeschylus, with maybe rolls
38:45of lyric poetry that we don't have, rolls of beautiful poetry.
38:49In the 18th century, excavations at the Villa of Papyri were abandoned because of poisonous gases in the tunnels.
38:57When he rediscovered the Villa in the 20th century, archaeologist Antonio de Simone hoped to excavate the entire structure.
39:04At the time, he didn't realize just how much the first excavations had missed.
39:11It would be a major undertaking to bring to light just one part of the villa, which was buried under
39:16the modern city of Ekralano.
39:23We are in the Villa of the Papyri, and this is the arcade outside the atrium.
39:29This point offered the best panoramic view.
39:35We have to imagine that this mosaic-decorated floor was part of a hallway and a great balcony that faced
39:41the Gulf of Naples.
39:47Even after 2,000 years, the beautiful mosaic floors and fresco-covered walls revealed the wealth and elite status of
39:55the original owners.
39:58These owners were familiar with philosophy.
40:02Virgil probably stayed here, as did Philodinus, these great representatives of ancient literature and philosophy.
40:09And the refinement of the house furnished a most appropriate context for the circle of intellectuals who visited here.
40:20When we resumed the excavation of this site, we came down to this level on these mosaics to verify what
40:27had been done in the 18th century.
40:31We came down through a well that was here but can't be seen anymore because it was taken out during
40:37the excavations.
40:38It was not far from this site where nearly 2,000 papyrus rolls were found in the 18th century, in
40:45room number 5, which is still unexcavated.
40:54And from room number 5, along this trajectory, were found at the nearly 2,000 papyri that are now kept
41:00in the National Library in Naples.
41:06But De Simone says the discovery of the papyri was unusual. The library was not intact. Scrolls were found scattered
41:14along the floor.
41:15He believes that when Vesuvius erupted, the papyri were being moved to safety.
41:23In all likelihood, the owners of the villa considered the papyri a very valuable possession.
41:28And so, in the process of fleeing towards the sea, they tried to save this papyri by carrying the cases
41:35with them.
41:37If an effort was being made to move the papyri in the course of the few days in which the
41:44eruption took place,
41:46then the papyri might then have been transported to a more distant part of the villa, or the villa grounds.
41:52It's possible that if you find the way in which they would have got out of the house,
41:57and the way in which they would have got down to the sea from the house,
42:00that there might be other travelling boxes, for example, that would be found along that route.
42:06Many scholars agree that there may be other papyri found in locations throughout the villa.
42:11If you're asking, are there going to be more texts discovered?
42:15Well, yes, I'd say probably there are a lot more still buried.
42:19And if there was a main library, then the chances are it could well still be there.
42:24In 1996, the prospect of finding another library here increases when Desimone makes a startling discovery.
42:32He determines that the original villa of the papyri was at least three stories tall,
42:38but only the top level has ever been excavated or explored.
42:47Here we are on the lower level, just below the public area of the villa.
42:51As you can see, it's an impressive facade, well constructed.
42:56This level was made up of living quarters, not for the servants, but for the masters of the house.
43:05A rare glimpse inside this room reveals beautiful frescoes and mosaics.
43:15This lower level is full of rooms with mosaics on the floors and important pictures on the walls.
43:26First of all, we can say that this room isn't isolated.
43:29You have access to other rooms.
43:33And from this room, you can enter the other rooms.
43:37This is all the remains of the wooden door that led to the other rooms.
43:44Above the door is a board painted red and a frame with painted friezes,
43:50and even farther up, other decorations.
44:04The vault is decorated as well.
44:07On the vault, we see a stucco frame that runs along the sides
44:10and splits into decorations of climbing ivy.
44:15And from this room, one could have gone into still another one.
44:20This is the door jam of another passageway.
44:24So from this room, one could have gone in any direction.
44:29I believe, in fact I'm convinced, that in these levels,
44:33there are certainly other papyri brought down here by the villa's owners
44:37who were trying to save themselves.
44:41On the lower levels of the villa,
44:4320th century archaeologists find two new works of sculpture.
44:46Many believe that if there is sculpture on these levels,
44:49there could also be more papyri.
44:56On the first layer of the villa that was on the sea,
44:59two beautiful heads were found.
45:02I wrote an article right away.
45:04Today the heads, tomorrow the papyri.
45:08Because, as we were able to find these new works of art,
45:11so we would be able to find the papyri.
45:18Modern archaeologists are forced to stop digging here,
45:21before they can open this door to see what is on the other side.
45:25The dig is one casualty of a new government policy,
45:28to suspend excavation and focus instead
45:31on preservation of Italy's many archaeological sites.
45:35But many scholars are hopeful that one day
45:38the villa excavation will be reopened.
45:40If there is a library, I think that the water that I've seen
45:44around the excavation could perhaps be seeping down
45:48and destroying the papyrus rolls.
45:51So I have a great hope that we will,
45:53that the excavations will be continued.
45:56Well, in general, I would support excavation in the villa eventually.
46:02But there are many problems with such an excavation.
46:05For one thing, it's not normally considered a good archaeological technique.
46:10to go looking for something in particular.
46:13You know that that beautiful villa
46:16can't fail to be a great artistic discovery.
46:20That's really the important thing,
46:22and I think to say we've got to get in there
46:24and get the papyri is a mistake,
46:26because it's the whole complex.
46:30Perhaps no one is more anxious to see what is inside the villa
46:33than Marcello Gigante.
46:35There is a part of the villa which never was excavated.
46:44We know this.
46:47And then we hope that the archaeologists will again
46:57excavate our villa.
47:00While the original villa of the papyri is still buried,
47:03it is possible to experience the richness of the villa firsthand,
47:07not in Naples, Italy, but in Malibu, California.
47:11J. Paul Getty's replica of the villa of the papyri,
47:14built in the 1970s, was based on the original 18th century floor plan drawings.
47:20A collector of antiquities,
47:21Getty wanted to create an authentic setting for his collections.
47:26He said, I wanted to build a building that was the kind of place
47:31in which the objects would originally have been displayed,
47:34so that people could really appreciate them
47:37in something analogous to their original context.
47:40It does give people a very good sense of what a Roman luxury villa was like.
47:46This mosaic floor is a replica of the first pavements
47:50found in the villa of the papyri in the 18th century.
47:54The Getty Villa succeeded in capturing the grandeur
47:57of the original villa of the papyri at Herculaneum.
48:00At one point, the superintendent of excavations
48:02traveled from Pompeii to Malibu to see the museum.
48:06He said, it's extraordinary.
48:07This is the only place where one can really experience
48:11a Roman luxury villa as it was intended to be seen.
48:14J. Paul Getty never saw the finished Getty Villa in person,
48:18but the museum stands as his tribute to the ancient world.
48:25Today at Herculaneum, the debate continues about the future
48:29of the original Villa of the Papyri.
48:31Most archaeologists agree that it is more important
48:34to preserve what has already been excavated here
48:37than to expose new parts of the site.
48:41We simply don't have very good techniques, in many cases,
48:44for conserving these objects.
48:46In fact, the situation around there is so disastrous
48:49that many things which we could preserve aren't being preserved
48:52simply because we don't have the money and the people to do it.
48:56Everything is in a critical condition.
48:59Wherever you go, you see the appalling difficulty
49:02of maintaining what has been excavated.
49:05You can look at the bits that were excavated in the 18th century,
49:08and they're reduced effectively to bare walls, to rubble.
49:13You can't see any frescoes.
49:15If there are any mosaics,
49:16they've long since been overgrown by vegetation and so on.
49:20And, essentially, it's lost, apart from the very bare bones, the skeleton.
49:25The few excavations that are active today at Pompeii
49:28are different from those in the 18th century.
49:31They focus on the pre-Roman history of the city.
49:35There is very little pressure or interest in exposing new parts of the city
49:40because of the problem of maintaining and preserving the rest of it.
49:43Take this out carefully here.
49:44When you get into here, you can't do more than just try and...
49:48Everything that hasn't been actually restored within the last 10 years
49:53needs restoration now.
49:55And that is why there's so much worry about doing new excavation.
50:00If you can't maintain the excavations of as recently as 50, even 30 years ago,
50:07how can you justify doing new excavation which will add to the problem?
50:11The Italian government has made big efforts in recent years
50:15to increase the money spent on the very costly process
50:19of restoring and maintaining the site.
50:21I think that's very welcome.
50:23But maybe you can never win.
50:29Like the archaeological sites that were frozen in time
50:32when they were sealed under volcanic material,
50:34the Herculaneum papyri are also deteriorating.
50:41I mean, we're losing pieces of them all the time.
50:45The papyri are disintegrating in front of our very eyes.
50:49When you look at a scroll, there is black dust over the whole thing.
50:53If you just take a little bitty piece of this carbonized papyrus
50:56and just touch it, it just turns to dust immediately.
51:01One's always afraid when working over the materials of sneezing.
51:06It is a terrifying thought that one could blow away a part of the scroll by an ill-advised sneeze.
51:14Deterioration has always been a big issue.
51:16Even Piaggio says that the longer a scroll has been open,
51:20the fainter its characters have become.
51:23The text that I'm working on, when I started working on them 10 years ago,
51:27I could read many more letters in them than I can read today.
51:31We have no photographic record of what they looked like then
51:34because the photographic techniques were not such that they could capture them.
51:38On the 250th anniversary year of the scroll's discovery,
51:42the National Library and Brigham Young University complete an imaging project
51:46as they work to convert multispectral images of more than 10,000 scroll fragments
51:51into a permanent digital library.
51:54No one has really come up with a particularly good way of conserving the Herculanean papyri
51:58because anything you do to them alters them.
52:01And so the modern approach to conservation is to try to make as good an image of an object as
52:08possible.
52:09And these images are so far the best that we've been able to get.
52:13It's really exciting to have tens of thousands of images in this digital library.
52:18No matter what happens to the originals, we'll be able to now have digital images
52:23that will survive indefinitely.
52:25The creation of a digital library will assure that the philosophers and writers
52:29whose voices are heard only through the Herculanean papyri
52:32will never be silenced again.
52:39Mount Vesuvius looms over cities ancient and modern here on the Bay of Naples.
52:45The active volcano is a constant reminder of an ancient tragedy.
52:50I'm always struck by just how close Vesuvius is.
52:54It's always looming up on the horizon.
52:57You can't forget that it's there.
53:00And I suppose the people who live there, perhaps they did forget that it was there
53:05and they couldn't believe what was happening.
53:06For visitors here, there is always a sense of the people who lived in these spaces and built these cities.
53:14I would like to feel the ghosts of antiquity rather more strongly and not less strongly.
53:20In a sense, what I want to do is feel their presence here and how did they use these spaces
53:26that we see.
53:31You can see the moment of death very vividly, but in a sense what I want is not the moment
53:37of death.
53:38It's getting behind that to the life, the many moments of life behind that.
53:42And it is here. The traces are here.
53:45And it requires a patient effort of historical imagination to put those traces together and recapture ancient life.
53:54The Herculaneum papyri alone reveal the people's thoughts and daily lives in the days before Vesuvius swallowed up these ancient
54:02cities.
54:04It makes me sad that that kind of tragedy was what froze Herculaneum so that we can read these texts.
54:12I love to imagine Philodemus reading these things to people like Virgil.
54:16I love putting myself back, back there in the villa.
54:27It is silent here in the villa of the papyri, where a doorway stands unopened and a part of the
54:33villa unexplored.
54:35The scholars who study the Herculaneum papyri recognize that the work has its own timetable.
54:42Still, they are anxious and hopeful that the search will one day resume for a lost library.
54:49I'm disappointed, of course, like so many things in this long story,
54:53which takes place at time intervals which aren't really compatible with the scale of a single human life.
55:00That that brings up the prospect that I may in the end be too old and tired to rejoice in
55:07these new papyri if they ever get discovered.
55:11I hope that before my death I can see the whole villa at the at the light of our sun.
55:26I hope so.
55:42I hope so.
55:43I hope so.
55:51I hope so.
56:04Still,
56:22Not Floral