Contents of a library

[Crispina]

After watching a documentary on Herculaneum for the 10th.time, and the fact that much more of the ancient city lies beneath the modern city, I was wondering what would one expect to actually find in an ancient library? Has one ever been found?

 

I remember the news about the burnt manuscripts being made readable, but don't remember if these were from an ancient Roman city or other.

[Bryaxis Hecatee]

well those papyrii you're talking about come from the villa of the papyrii next to herculanum where two librairies were found. we do also have some public librairies which have been found but without any content (think about the one in ephesus for exemple).

 

the papyrii from the villa come in fact not from one but from two librairies, one greek and one roman and contain mainly philosophical works.

[Ludovicus]

Have any lost Greek or Roman works been found among the burnt parchments?

[Melvadius]

Have any lost Greek or Roman works been found among the burnt parchments?

 

Much of the library excavated to date seems to relate to Epicurean philosophy which is written in Greek. There are suspicions that there is also a Latin library - possibly on an unexcavated lower level of the villa but AFAIK this has not yet been confirmed. Even if it does exist there is always the possibility that only the Greek texts may have survived where they could be found as the villa was being evacuated when it was overwhelmed. I was told that the papyrii were found scattered through several parts of the villa some in carrying boxes and others apparently individually or still on shelves.

 

Because of being carbonised and how the scrolls were originally opened most are to some extent or other only in a fragmentary condition however these do provide snippets of several works which are otherwise unknown or only known from commentaries in other surviving works.

 

The Herculaneum Society's magazine carries a short article about the Philodemus Project and the scrolls in general here and mentions the collaboration project with Brigham Young University, on digitally imaging the papyri from Herculaneum. Examples of before and after images are on the BYU site here while a more detailed explanation of their work from 2001 is in the BYU spring 2001 magazine here.

 

I believe they are now vastly improved the techniques for opening the scrolls for imaging but it is still a long, time consuming and expensive process.