BYU classicist, Roger Macfarlane, who has spent more than three decades hunting for lost Latin literature in carbonized scrolls came to UVU with an honest assessment: most of the discovered Herculaneum papyri is barely readable. But what we might still find could change everything.Further:
From the moment European scholars learned that a library had been buried at Herculaneum, the speculation about what it might contain has been almost comically ambitious. A letter from 1753 — before serious attempts to open the scrolls had even begun — already expressed hope for a portion of Livy's history of Rome, most of which has been lost to time. By 1739, a German scholar was wishfully cataloging the texts he hoped to find: Diodorus Siculus, Berossus on Babylon, Megasthenes on India, Livy, Sallust, and, in a note that Macfarlane clearly relished, "the Five Books of Sallust, although in that event all the labor I have already expended in attempting to reconstruct them would itself be rendered futile."An informative article asking important questions about the Herculaneum library: What is in it? What might be? With some answers to both. I've posted my own wish list of Herculaneum books here and here.The list has only grown since. ...
For many PaleoJudaica posts on the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE and its destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and on the efforts to reconstruct and decipher the carbonized library at Herculaneum, start here and follow the links.
Cross-file under Lost Books (also here).
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