The New Treasures of Pompeii

> Scratched lightly, but legibly, on an unfinished wall of a house that was being refurbished when the volcano blew is a banal notation in charcoal: “in [d]ulsit pro masumis esurit[ions],” which roughly translates as “he binged on food.” While not listing a year, the graffito, likely scrawled by a builder, cites “XVI K Nov”—the 16th day before the first of November on the ancient calendar, or October 17 on the modern one. That’s nearly two months after August 24, the fatal eruption’s official date, which originated with a letter by Pliny the Younger, an eyewitness to the catastrophe, to the Roman historian Tacitus 25 years later and transcribed over the centuries by monks.

> Massimo Osanna, Pompeii’s general director and mastermind of the project, is convinced that the notation was idly doodled a week before the blast. “This spectacular find finally allows us to date, with confidence, the disaster,” he says. “It reinforces other clues pointing to an autumn eruption: unripe pomegranates, heavy clothing found on bodies, wood-burning braziers in homes, wine from the harvest in sealed jars. When you reconstruct the daily life of this vanished community, two months of difference are important. We now have the lost piece of a jigsaw puzzle.”

Inscription: https://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com/b-AKU2VJ_IfsLSz6vS4uxPtuRAQ=/...

I can picture the situation. A construction worker is annoyed because their coworker is off eating and not helping construct a wall. The construction worker vents their frustration by doodling on the unfinished wall. That doodle lasts 2000 years and helps archeologists determine when Mount Vesuvius eruption occurred.

Also keep in mind that the train (SorentoNaples) is rather (in)famous for pick pockets, though we didn't have any issues.

Unbelievable. Are we really that close?

If I might ask: what texts do you secretly hope might be found?

The micro-CT machines currently available are either optimized for smaller object sizes or for lower resolutions. The challenge is to build a machine that can scan a "large" object such as an entire scroll at a high resolution. The above comment is saying that you could design and build such a machine using components currently available (expensive, but possible).

That's not the sole obstacle though, next you have to extract the information you want (visible text) from the resulting data. There are some more challenges here yet to be solved, notably segmenting out the individual layers from each other. This is particularly hard with the Herculaneum scrolls, as there are often hundreds of layers all smashed together, and they are wrinkled and warped. But we're working on this too!

Edit: as for the contents, it could be just about anything from the time period. Many of these scrolls have been opened manually over the last two hundred years since their discovery. This has largely destroyed them into thousands of fragments, but in many cases has revealed some text, so we know some of the contents of the library. Much of it is by Philodemus, who was an Epicurean philosopher but not particularly notable. It is believed that there could be more scrolls from other sections of the library still buried, as much of the town is not excavated. If it is shown that we can indeed read the contents noninvasively, it might be an incentive to dig up more of them and see what is there.

I'd like to understand the potential for recovering lost works of any kind. What sort of organizations exist for this?

Burned scrolls, is one source.

In India, there are thousands of manuscripts rotting in temple treasuries.

Palimsets have yet to be discovered in archives.

And even archives themselves may contain lost treasures through misclassification.

Are there other potential sources for finding lost manuscripts?