ASHES TO ASHES IN ANCIENT ITALY

Abstract

tomb of King Tutankhamen in Egypt, archaeologists in Italy found three hundred rolled-up ancient papyrus scrolls. The scrolls were in the remains of a villa that was being excavated within the ruins of a town called Herculaneum, near Mount Vesuvius and modern-day Naples, which had been buried during an eruption on August 24 in 79 CE. They had formed part of a private Roman library kept by their owner in his house, which is now known, appropriately, as the “Villa of the Papyri” and was possibly owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar. Although they were excavated more than two hundred fifty years ago, the intact scrolls were saved, though they were carbonized and too fragile to unroll. For centuries it was believed that the scrolls would remain as mere curiosities, even though they now look like lumps of carbonized wood. But recently, beginning in 2009 and continuing through 2016 so far, papyrologists (scholars who study such scrolls and scraps of papyrus) have 1