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thewayneI've written about using new imaging techniques plus computed tomography and AI has enabled the charcoal briquets that were formally scrolls at Vesuvius and Herculaneum to begin to be read. At Herculaneum, a library, of sorts, was discovered containing at least 600 intact scrolls. The University of Kentucky has developed a software system called Volume Cartography to help unroll these scrolls.
One such scroll describes Plato's last night and where he was buried! He was suffering from a high fever and was close to death, but still of somewhat sound mind. A young girl was brought in to play the flute for him, and he critiqued her lack of rhythm! I love it. 'I may be about to die, but your playing sucks! Work on it!'
As to his final resting place, "... the few surviving texts from that period indicate that the philosopher was buried somewhere in the garden of the Academy he founded in Athens. The garden was quite large, but archaeologists have now deciphered a charred ancient papyrus scroll recovered from the ruins of Herculaneum, indicating a more precise burial location: in a private area near a sacred shrine to the Muses..." There's one thing that I absolutely hate about this article - it doesn't say anything as to whether or not we know where the Academy and garden is/was located!
This is all part of the Vesuvius Challenge to read these scrolls, and it's making tremendous progress!
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/deciphered-herculaneum-papyrus-reveals-precise-burial-place-of-plato/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/29/herculaneum-scroll-plato-final-hours-burial-site
One such scroll describes Plato's last night and where he was buried! He was suffering from a high fever and was close to death, but still of somewhat sound mind. A young girl was brought in to play the flute for him, and he critiqued her lack of rhythm! I love it. 'I may be about to die, but your playing sucks! Work on it!'
As to his final resting place, "... the few surviving texts from that period indicate that the philosopher was buried somewhere in the garden of the Academy he founded in Athens. The garden was quite large, but archaeologists have now deciphered a charred ancient papyrus scroll recovered from the ruins of Herculaneum, indicating a more precise burial location: in a private area near a sacred shrine to the Muses..." There's one thing that I absolutely hate about this article - it doesn't say anything as to whether or not we know where the Academy and garden is/was located!
This is all part of the Vesuvius Challenge to read these scrolls, and it's making tremendous progress!
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/deciphered-herculaneum-papyrus-reveals-precise-burial-place-of-plato/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/29/herculaneum-scroll-plato-final-hours-burial-site
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Date: 2024-05-05 11:34 pm (UTC)Hugs, Jon
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Date: 2024-05-10 05:35 am (UTC)Fairly impressive technology usage there to scan and then unroll and reconstruct what's possibly there from things that are too fragile to have unrolled the originals.
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Date: 2024-05-10 04:31 pm (UTC)It's pretty amazing and cool stuff. You can't even touch the originals without them disintegrating into powder!