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Lost Library Returns After 2000 Years

Posted by michael on from the mudbath dept.

Technodummy writes "An update on Reading the Ancient Papyri. The long-buried Villa of the Papyri, one of Italy's richest Roman villas famed for its library of ancient scrolls, opened to the public this weekend almost 2,000 years after it was submerged in volcanic mud. The scrolls, which looked like sticks of charcoal when they were first discovered, have mostly turned out to be works of Greek epicurean philosophy from the first century BC."

4 of 46 comments (clear)

  1. Most exciting! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "Hundreds of the scrolls have been carefully opened and many others could be read in the near future thanks to digital and scanning technology."

    These scrolls are not lost to us!

    Who among us has not thought bitterly of the 532,800 scroll of two-three hundred years before our era that comprised the Library of Alexandria?

    Today only a small portion of its catalogue remains to tease us with lost knowedge.

    Everything that has been salvaged of Greek antiquity is a tiny fraction of what we know they had.

    And why, in the case of the Library of Alexandria?

    Religious ferver. It was burned to the ground by followers of Christ.

    1. Re:Most exciting! by CaptainCarrot · · Score: 2, Insightful
      As you point out, the people doing the burning in the verse you quoted were the owners of the books themselves. They were burning them not because it's seen as a valuable thing to do in and of itself, but because they had become convinced by the preceding events (Acts 19:13-17) that the mere possession of these books was a positive danger. In context, they would appear to have more likely been books on demonology rather than astrology. The NT isn't particularly hard on astrologers as such, and certain of them in particular it speaks of with clear approval.

      No doubt there were a number of such books in the Royal Library besides the historical, scientific, mathematical, engineering, and philosophical works. However, a Christian willing to torch the entire collection for the sake of the small number of occult works in it would have had to have been more fanatical than, say, St. Basil the Great, or St. John Chrysostom, or any of the multitude of Church Fathers who valued learning highly and spoke of pre-Christian philosophers in cautiously positive terms. We call this "zeal not according to knowledge", referencing Romans 10:2.

      I wasn't speaking of book-burning in general, of course. But I really don't think it's fair to judge societies of Antiquity, or even the Middle Ages, by modern standards. Even the Sibyl in the days of the Roman Republic burned her own books for no better reason than that she wasn't being paid for them. It hasn't always been an act of tyranny.

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      And the brethren went away edified.
  2. Good news by falsification · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This is good news. I hope that once all the scrolls have been opened and published, we will finally have the complete oeuvres of such greats as Aristotle. It could change the way we think about the ancients. It probably will not be as significant an event as the rediscovery of the classics that preceded the Renaissance, however.

  3. As much as i hate to refute good moslem bashing by young-earth · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Just a little bit of time with Google and you'll find the most likely answer is it could never have been the Christians, as it was gone before 20 B.C., and since Christ was born around 4 B.C., well, it's obviously not the Christians nor is it the muslims, since they were later in history than the Christians.

    For a good summary, see here. Basically Plutarch and Livy both wrote that Caesar was responsible, and they wrote long before the Catholic destruction in 391 of the satellite library.

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    Got Wisdom?