mage courtesy of the Digital Re
NARRATIVE – Thanks to an international competition, young researchers managed to read a 2000-year-old text.
It’s a text that talks about music, fun and capers! This roll of papyrus was literally cooked 2000 years ago at more than 320°C, when torrents of mud and volcanic material descended from Vesuvius to cover the cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii (79 AD). .). The pages are welded together and its contents were thought to be lost forever. But an international competition made it possible to achieve the immense feat of deciphering and reading hundreds of words spread over more than 15 columns.
Discovered between 1752 and 1754, with several hundred other manuscripts, in a sumptuous Roman villa in Herculaneum belonging to Calpurnius Pison Caesoninus, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, and since called “Villa of the Papyri”, the papyrus scroll was since preserved in the libraries of the Institut de France in Paris. It had been offered, with five other scrolls, by Napoleon Bonaparte who had received them in 1802 as a gift from the King of Naples. The manuscript…
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