A scroll of Herculaneum

A multidisciplinary group of researchers has managed to read some words written on one of the scrolls buried in Herculaneum following the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. The parchment, called PHerc. 172, is one of the scrolls that were contained in the libraries of Herculaneum in the 1st century AD. When, in 79 AD, Vesuvius erupted, destroying the city and killing almost 2,000 people, the pyroclastic flow of ash buried the city. thousands of artifacts, including the scrolls, which were carbonized.

The parchment PHerc.172 has a long history. It was found in 1750 by a farmer, who was careful not to open it, and then donated, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to Ferdinand IV, king of Naples and Sicily. He later donated it, along with five other scrolls, to George IV, future king of the United Kingdom. Today it is preserved at the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford.

The Herculaneum scrolls, preserved rolled up, as they were found, can only be opened with great caution and consolidation interventions, risking losing the contents. For this reason, for some years now, new technologies have been used to digitally unroll the parchment, creating a 3D image of it. In this case, researchers used a synchrotron – a sort of particle accelerator – to produce high-resolution X-ray images of the scroll and artificial intelligence to detect the ink on its pages. It is now up to researchers to decipher the Greek text of the papyrus, which consists of the last 26 lines of some columns. So far, the words ἀδιάληπτος (foolish), φοβ (fear), διατροπή (disgust) and βίου (life) have been identified. Thanks to these few words, scholars hypothesize that the scroll contains a text by the Greek philosopher and poet Philodemus of Gadara, who lived in the 1st century BC, since the writing is similar to other scrolls attributed to the same author and the word "fool" is characteristic and recurrent in his work.


NP March '25
Agnese Picco