How a handful of Mormons with an infrared camera unlocked the secrets buried beneath Vesuvius.
Steve Booras, a computer professional from Provo, Utah, is leading us through a labyrinth that was once a royal palace in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. It's hot, and we're hurrying along corridors lined with books. Lots of books. Lots of books in the way Keanu Reeves says "lots of guns." This vast building, no longer home to the royalty of Naples, is now one of Italy's three national libraries. The serried shelves past which we're rushing look tall and long enough to contain all the words written in Italian since the palace was built a few centuries ago.
If we had time - we being two of Booras' colleagues from Brigham Young University, Booras' son, and myself - who knows what we might find in the slightly dusty data arrays that rise high above our heads? Volta's original research on electricity, firsthand reports of Garibaldi's military campaigns, scandalized local accounts of Lord Nelson's dalliance with Lady Hamilton, any number of things that someone, somewhere, once felt moved to write down. But we don't have time. Booras, a neat man in his early sixties who's wearing a smart blazer, is hurrying us along in an almost white-rabbit way, his need for speed exacerbated by the fact that, although he worked in this Borgesian building for more than a year not so long ago, he doesn't seem completely sure where he's going.
Eventually, we come to a pair of rooms, one light, one dark. The light one has high, uncluttered walls painted in an institutional green. The entire ceiling is made of milky glass, smoothing powerful Neapolitan sunshine over everything below. There are stereo microscopes on some of the utilitarian desks. It is a room for seeing.
The dark room next door, on the other hand, is a room for storing. It is ringed by steel cases with wide, shallow drawers that hold trays containing thousands of blackened tatters. In a display near the shuttered windows are some fused cylinders of cinders; they look like turds that have been burned and then fossilized, or possibly vice versa. And that is, indeed, pretty much what happened to them. But they are not turds. They are papyruses, scrolls like those on which all the great thoughts of antiquity were once recorded. The words on them were written down 2,000 years ago; when they were discovered 1,800 years later, they were the first handwritten documents from the ancient world that modern eyes had ever seen.
The reason this stash of papyruses was preserved is just outside the shuttered windows: Mount Vesuvius. On August 24, AD 79, these scrolls were suddenly covered by 65 feet of fast-flowing volcanic mud. In the succeeding centuries, almost every other papyrus in the world was either burned in a more mundane fire or eaten by rats or cut up in order to be recycled into the next technological solution to the problem of information storage - the book. Meanwhile, these scrolls sat preserved beneath the volcanic rock.
But not very well preserved. The volcano's gases carbonized the scrolls almost instantly, and moisture trapped by mud fused the layers of papyrus together. The fragments that fill the steel cases around the dark room represent two centuries of careful if intermittent work unpeeling and pondering about a thousand of these artifacts. On some of the fragments, there are clearly legible words. But many of the others bear almost no sign of meaning, no matter how fervently scholars strain their eyes though the microscopes next door.
Some classicists believe that the papyruses, extracted in the 18th century from the buried town of Herculaneum in the Bay of Naples, are just the blackened tip of an iceberg of knowledge. The unexcavated parts of the building where these papyruses were found may contain thousands more. It is not entirely fanciful to imagine that they include works of literature and philosophy that have never been seen by modern eyes: lost companions to The Odyssey and The Iliad from the age of Homer, treatises by Plato and dialogs by Aristotle, tragedies by Sophocles, poetry by Sappho. Those shriveled rolls still locked in the rock could one day form the core of a unique library containing the lost roots of Western European thought.
To get from the library we're standing in to that of the classicists' speculations will be quite a journey. It will require large amounts of money and large amounts of luck, careful negotiation of the politics of Italian antiquarianism and the equally careful removal of thousands of tons of rock. And for that library to be all that it can be - for its works to be readable and relatively accessible - it will also require the expertise of technologists like Steve Booras. Booras can read even less classical Greek than I can read Italian, but over the past few years he has done as much as anyone to make the fragments of ancient knowledge stacked in this darkened room legible. It would be wrong to say that Steve Booras and his colleagues will bring to light a lost classical library of the imagination. But they do have their fingers on the switch.
Until the late '90s, Booras had never heard of the Herculaneum scrolls. Nor had most other laypeople - and rather more surprising, a lot of professional classicists were all but as ignorant. Despite their having been the first papyruses recovered by modern scholars, the Herculaneum scrolls never made it into the mainstream of "papyrology," as studies of smaller stashes found elsewhere have come to be called. Richard Janko, a professor of classics at the University of Michigan, says that this neglect by his profession was extraordinary, but that its cause was clear: "They were just so hard to read."
Janko himself first saw the artifacts in 1986. Intrigued by more than a century of neglected scholarship, he traveled to Naples to see what he could make of the slighted texts. Looking back, he concludes that reading the Herculaneum scrolls was the most difficult challenge he'd ever faced.
Poring over the scraps in the stifling heat of a Neapolitan summer, with every breath of air excluded from the reading room lest it blow away a feather of papyrus, is a formidable endurance test. Deciphering even one letter under the microscope is an achievement. Janko recalls spending 10 minutes trying to make out the faintest hint of the letters in an almost entirely obscured patch of scroll before realizing he was looking at it upside down. Right side up, it was scarcely more forthcoming.
Studies are often undertaken with partners in order to reduce self-delusion; otherwise, the word you want to see - the word you expect - forces itself onto the Rorschach's cradle of burnt fibers. "You come up with your theory about what letters are there," says Janko, "and then you say, 'The letter after the alpha - what do you see there?' and the person says, 'I see a vertical line then a line going across at the top,' and you say, 'Which letters do you think it could be?' and the person says 'Gamma or tau,' and you say, 'Good, that's what I thought, and I think it's tau, don't you?' and so on."
Not only are the letters somewhere between difficult and impossible to read, but the eye must be constantly aware of the possibility that some are in the wrong place. The process of unrolling the petrified scrolls does not always produce a single layer of papyrus; some patches end up inadvertently detached: What looks like one piece of text may have an island of another layered over it or be pierced by holes that reveal other words beneath. The bumps and potholes may be only a fraction of a millimeter in height or depth, but they can break the axles of a heavily freighted interpretation just like that.
Such challenges, Janko says, have made him see the simple act of reading in a new way. The ideas and their physical representation become entwined, impressed on one another, indistinguishable.
The reason Steve Booras is rushing us through the library is that a ceremony is about to begin, and we don't know where. We retrace our steps and eventually find our way to the director's office, where various dignitaries are gathering. From there, we move on to the ceremony itself. It takes place on one of the lower floors in a richly ornamented, high-ceilinged, gallery-girdled chamber as opulent as the reading room is austere. The event is the rededication of the library's papyrus research center in honor of Marcello Gigante, a local professor who devoted much of his life to the enigmatic scrolls.
The ceremony begins with the presentation of a small plaque to the contingent from BYU. Booras and his colleague Roger MacFarlane, a younger man in a seersucker jacket and a natty bow tie, step up to receive it almost bashfully. On a lectern to one side of the room sits a larger plaque the visitors presented to the library earlier. It displays two different pictures of the same scrap of papyrus. One shows neat lines of Greek lettering. The other is utterly illegible, a ground zero of text. The difference between them is Steve Booras' camera.
Booras and his team have recorded images of every piece of Herculaneum papyrus in the library: 25,000 images on 345 CDs. The images were made with a high-quality digital camera. More important, most of them were also made with infrared filters. On a legible papyrus seen under normal light, the ink appears black because it absorbs the light; the papyrus reflects it. The carbonized fibers of the Herculaneum scrolls, however, absorb light just as well as the ink does, making the background a distinctly low-contrast black. But the papyrus does not absorb infrared wavelengths quite as readily; in the infrared, there is still contrast.
Scholars have used infrared film to tease details out of documents since the '30s. But in the mid-1990s, Gregory Bearman, a researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, advanced the practice by converting a digital camera that was able to work in many different wavelengths - a multispectral imager - to the same purpose. It soon started producing results, and Bearman was happy to turn his technology from planets to parchment: "Every space instrument I've ever been closely associated with," he says somewhat ruefully, "has been canceled."
In his first application of the technology, Bearman created images of the Genesis Apocryphon, one of the most dilapidated of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and added 20 percent to the known text by revealing letters that were illegible under visible light. This caught the attention of a small team of Mormons working on a CD-ROM version of the scrolls that would include both images and text. One of them was Booras. A software tester at nearby WordPerfect, Booras had for years been using his computer skills to help out with BYU projects. Charitable donations - some of it from Alan Ashton, a former BYU professor and cofounder of WordPerfect - made it possible for Booras to apply digital technologies to ancient texts full-time.
In 1998, using Bearman's advances, Booras presented pictures of burned scrolls from a monastery church in Jordan to an international conference on papyrology in Italy. Marcello Gigante was in the audience and immediately saw that the multispectral technique could be applied to the Herculaneum scrolls. If Booras was in the business of reading unreadable papyruses, Gigante told him, he should come to Naples. They had the biggest supply of them in the world.
And so Booras spent a couple of years sifting through the almost-ashes in Naples, examining the 4,400 fragments framed in glass. The camera's tunable filter allowed him to sample dozens of narrow bands of visible and invisible spectrum, looking for the band that would produce the clearest text. After checking various wavelengths, he found that for most of the fragments a single pass in the 950-nanometer band provided good imagery, though in some cases he used more wavelengths to achieve the best possible definition. A few fragments actually produced their best images in a narrow band of green.
On the day we attend the ceremony in the library, a young researcher bubbling with enthusiasm calls up on his laptop a whole string of favorite images from Booras' collection. The words written on the scrolls, which were read aloud in discussions at Herculaneum before Rome was an Empire, are clear enough to discern distinct styles of handwriting. Two thousand years on, this scholar can recognize the work of individual scribes.
While Janko and his colleagues are finding their labors eased by the new images (for one, they are no longer confined to working in Naples), perhaps the greatest beneficiary of Booras' work is a fairly obscure first-century BC philosopher and poet called Philodemus.
Philodemus does not stand out in histories of philosophy. He was one of a number of like-minded followers of Epicurus who came to the Roman republic after its consul, Sulla, sacked Athens in 86 BC.
His greatest claim on the classicists' attention is not so much what he wrote as the fact that much of what he wrote has not yet been read. It is news - news from the deep past.
The literature of Greco-Roman antiquity that exists in books today has been read and read and read again, for thousands of years. It was through this reading and recopying for new readers that it survived. But most classical writings did not survive. Working from the references in extant works, classicists have come to believe that roughly 90 percent of the written culture of Greece and Rome is lost to them. Epic and lyric poetry, towering drama, philosophy fundamental in the shaping of those cultures - all gone.
So, although he's not an Aristotle or a Plato, Philodemus' thoughts fill in a picture of his time. Better still, in expounding his thoughts, he summarizes those of others. He thus provides secondhand testimony on the contents of various lost works by the great philosophers.
That is why years have been spent in the hot, still air of the library. That is why the folds inflicted on the scrolls when Vesuvius crushed the villa above them have been painstakingly measured with calipers so that different fragments from the same scroll can be recognized and reunited. That is why new ways of unwinding the remaining papyruses have been developed and disagreed over. (One being discussed is a gas-based method that allows leaves of paper to float off each other. Used by the IRS to recover information from burned ledgers in tax cases, this technique has also been applied to papers retrieved from the Titanic.) That is why the digital images mean so much.
To those who have little interest in Philodemus, let alone his scribes, the pictures might seem interesting yet inconsequential. But Philodemus may be just the prolegomenon. The facts of his life suggest that the scrolls unearthed at the villa in Herculaneum were part of a much larger library. And any large library in those days would have been full of works now lost.
Details of Philodemus' biography are scarce. It's not known when he was born or died, how long he spent in Alexandria (possibly) or Athens (definitely). It's not known which, if any, of the various women featured in his often bawdy poetry might have been his wife, though the ones who required pay can probably be ruled out. But it is known that when he settled in Italy, he did so under the patronage of a high-powered plutocrat - Lucius Calpurnius Piso, one of the richest Romans of his day, scourge of Cicero and father-in-law to Caesar.
The 18th-century excavators of Herculaneum - they had started off just sinking a well, and then, finding relics at the bottom, began tunneling out belowground - realized fairly quickly that the villa was something special. It was vast, filled with beautiful mosaics and sculptures. Its design, with long colonnades flanking a pool in the courtyard, was so pleasing that when John Paul Getty needed a design on which to model his villa in Malibu, he used what was by then known as the Villa of the Papyri. Clearly, this was the home of someone with serious amounts of money, who was either cultured or at least hoped to appear so. It's hard to imagine that Piso - who had a live-in philosopher on call - would not have had an extensive library.
Why, then, were the uncovered works more or less all by Philodemus? One answer is that these papyruses were in the process of being saved from the disaster when the mud rolled over the villa, the boiling sea lapping at its lower terraces. The papyruses were discovered scattered along the colonnades, some loose, some in packing cases, as though they were in transit. The writings of Philodemus, goes the argument, had a special emotional value to Piso's heirs, because Philodemus had once lived in the villa. So when the volcano erupted, slaves were sent to gather the scrolls and carry them down to the shore, where boats would take them to safety with the rest of the household. The bulk of the library - works by more famous hands, but not as precious to the family and more easily replaced - was abandoned. According to this theory, some buried part of the palace may contain a collection of ancient texts too commonplace to have been worth saving then and too valuable to ignore now.
In the 1990s, new excavations brought the villa into daylight for the first time. In a great pit surrounded by greenhouses, the terraces that once led down to the sea have been revealed. But the rooms set within those terraces remain encased in rock. Many of the archaeologists involved feel this is appropriate; their principal interest is stopping the already excavated part of the town, a few hundred meters from the villa, from deteriorating. But to classical scholars, those hidden rooms are as exciting as unread poems by Dante or unseen plays by Shakespeare.
At present, through careful negotiation and some gentle lobbying of international opinion, the classicists are making progress persuading the preservationists to support further excavation. But even so, plans are limited to feasibility studies.
So whether the books, in fact, lie within, no one can know. The story of Piso's family saving the works of Great-grandfather's friend Philodemus is appealing, but it's hardly the only way things could have happened. Maybe there was no library - perhaps Piso's heirs were uninterested in such pursuits, their villa shelves as bare of reading matter as those of Camp David are said to have been during the presidency of Bush the Elder - and only the works of Philodemus were kept for sentimental reasons. Maybe they were stored separately, while the main library was bulldozed into the sea by the wall of mud.
Or maybe the rest of the library escaped with the villa's owners and slaves as they fled the cataclysm; maybe all was saved except for the works of Philodemus. Maybe Piso's heirs were among those who, early on in the eruption, managed to escape by sea, and as they sailed away, their world ablaze, maybe they gave a thought to the works of Philodemus left behind. Maybe they commemorated the loss by intoning the philosopher-poet's own prayer for a safe voyage:
Ino's son Melicertes, and you, Leukothea,
grey ruling
Spirit of the sea, protector from evils,
And choruses of Sea-nymphs, and waves,
and you, Poseidon,
And Thracian Zephyrus, gentlest of the winds,
Carry me softly across a flat sea as I flee
To land safe at the sweet shore of Peiraeus.
Among all the maybes, though, some certainty: No one on that dreadful day imagined that the scrolls left behind, crushed into the earth by flaming rock, would last longer than Rome's empire, or any empire that followed it. No one dreamed they'd one day be the last of their kind on earth, their words read with light that the eye cannot see, rewritten on discs of melted sand.
