If the scientists are right, we are on the verge of a groundbreaking discovery.
It appears we now have the technology to reverse the catastrophic damage done to these fragile papyri by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius almost 2,000 years ago.
And if we can read these 1,800 poorly barbecued scrolls, we may be on the verge of unveiling some of literature’s greatest missing masterpieces.
We therefore stand trembling on the threshold of a treasury that may well be worth more gold than that of Tutankhamun or any other pharaoh.
Perhaps we are about to uncork some truly mind-expanding volumes, works in 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, cultivated and cultured newspaper who can remain indifferent to what is at stake.
A fragment of a Herculaneum scroll shows the markings on the fragile material
A fragile Herculanuem scroll – part of a 2,000 year old pair, charred and preserved in crumpled, blackened cylinders by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius
They made us my friends. It was Greece and Rome – the classical world – that laid the foundations of our modern world.
You read these words in a semi-Latin language; you live in a democracy whose basic idea originated in Greece.
Your home, large or small, will be full of cornices, pediments, architraves and other little-noticed throwbacks from the classical canon of architecture.
You’ll be watching multi-episode TV revenge plots and family psychodramas that have their roots in the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.
Wherever you live in the West – in Europe or America or Australasia – you are the cultural and intellectual descendant of Greece and Rome, whether you recognize that fact 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 you talk about the G7 or the OECD countries, which are still responsible for the vast majority of the wealth and innovative power of humanity.
That sequence was a miracle in itself, because there was a terrible interruption between the ancient world and the Renaissance.
They called it the Dark Ages, which followed the fall of Rome; and in those Dark Ages the legacy of Greek and Roman culture was almost lost. The Renaissance only happened because there was a sudden revival of interest, beginning in Italy, in the thought and writings of the ancient world.
They began to dig out the texts – moldy and moth-eaten – that had been all but lost in European memory. They poke around in monastery libraries. The crusaders brought them back from Byzantium, where they had been kept by monks.
Slowly they translated and disseminated them, and in England those texts became the basis of our early modern or Elizabethan culture.
Shakespeare himself feasted on the great banquet 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 learned as he was, had access to only a small part of the corpus of Greek and Latin literature, because so much had already been destroyed. From time to time over the past few hundred years we have recovered a few fragments – like the bits of poetry on the backs of laundry frames, preserved in the dry sands of Egypt. But the holes remain, and they are painfully large.
Take Sappho, the lesbian in love from Lesbos. She was so famous in the ancient world and so revered that they called her the tenth Muse; and what we have is very beautiful indeed.
But we have only one complete poem by Sappho; and the more recent fragments from Oxyrhynchus in Egypt are so full of square brackets – where words are missing – that it is sometimes difficult to tell whether she is lusting after a boy or a girl (usually it is a girl).
Or take Aeschylus. Only a handful of his ninety plays have survived, but the influence of what we performed has been enormous. Seven Against Thebe has inspired everything from the Seven Samurai to the Magnificent Seven and the music of The Clash.
What if we find his other eighty plays, or Homer’s supposedly obscene Margites, or Aristotle in Comedy? So much has disappeared, so much 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’s amazing that we have this library at all.
A conservator shows a Papyrus Herculaneum, charred by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the National Library of Naples
The pyroclastic event took place at the end of August 79 AD* The waves of erupting Vesuvius engulfed the posh resorts of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and as the superheated volcanic matter rushed down the slope, it glazed the brains of people in its path, freezing them in their death throes.
And yet, when it came to a huge seaside villa near Herculaneum – which may have belonged to Calpurnius Piso, Julius Caesar’s father-in-law – something extraordinary happened.
The library was packed up, hoping it could escape the lava, but it was too late. The scrolls were not burned because there was no oxygen to burn them.
Instead, they were baked into crumpled, blackened cylinders. In the centuries since their discovery, there have been disastrous attempts to open them – and always the charred remains have crumbled away unreadable.
However, in recent months we have made a breakthrough. Using Harwell’s particle accelerator in Oxford to pinpoint the minerals in the ink, and using AI to work out which letters should form these inkblots, researchers were able to read 5 percent of a scroll that is not only unopened, but also unopened. can be opened.
They struck gold. It is clearly a work of Epicurean philosophy and of great potential importance. But we need to read more about it, and the process is currently cumbersome and expensive.
These rolls can be only four to eight inches wide, but they can be as long as fifty feet. It will cost a fortune to bring them to Harwell, and at the current rate it will cost more than £1 million for each of the 1,800 rolls – not to mention the others still in the villa.
Well, there is nothing for it, and no better investment for the world.
Now that we can read them, we should read them. When we look at these charred pieces of rough, we are looking at the literary foundations of our entire society.
Have we become so ignorant about our history, so apathetic, that we can just ignore this?
The technology is getting better and costs will drop. But it remains a bagatelle** for Western governments or a technology magnate.
We can now 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: Relates to, consists of, or denotes rock fragments erupted by a volcano
**Bagatelle: Something that is considered too unimportant or too easy to be worth much attention