Photographs of Herculaneum (Page 3)

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Recent archaeological work has rediscovered potentially one of the greatest treasure houses of contemporary Roman knowledge. The Villa of the Papyri was initially thought to contain unreadable charred scrolls fused into solid lumps when it was originally excavated in the 18th Century. About 1800 scrolls were discovered, the only library from the ancient world to survive into the modern era. Unrolling these scrolls was a difficult and destructive process, and even once they were unravelled, the carbonisation meant that the text was often impossible to decipher. These problems continue to make reading the scrolls problematic, but new developments in computer imaging techniques mean that previously invisible text can be deciphered. Tantalisingly, more scrolls may still remain in the unexcavated portion of the Villa.