Deciphered Herculaneum papyrus reveals more precise burial place of Plato
Historical accounts vary about how the Greek philosopher Plato died:
in bed while listening to a young woman playing the flute;
at a wedding feast;
or peacefully in his sleep.
But the few surviving texts from that period indicate that the philosopher was🔸 buried somewhere in the garden of the Academy 🔸he founded in Athens.
The garden was quite large, but
💥archaeologists have now deciphered a charred ancient papyrus scroll💥 recovered from the ruins of Herculaneum,
👉indicating a more precise burial location:
in a private area near a sacred shrine to the Muses, according to Constanza Millani, director of the Institute of Heritage Science at Italy's National Research Council.
As previously reported, the ancient Roman resort town Pompeii wasn't the only city destroyed in the catastrophic 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
Several other cities in the area, including the wealthy enclave of Herculaneum, were fried by clouds of hot gas called pyroclastic pulses and flows.
But still, some remnants of Roman wealth survived.
One palatial residence in #Herculaneum—believed to have once belonged to a man named Piso—contained hundreds of priceless written scrolls made from papyrus, singed into carbon by volcanic
Scientists have brought all manner of cutting-edge tools to bear on deciphering badly damaged ancient texts like the Herculaneum scrolls.
For instance, in 2019, German scientists used a combination of physics techniques (synchrotron radiation, infrared spectroscopy, and X-ray fluorescence) to virtually "unfold" an ancient Egyptian papyrus.
Brent Searles' lab at the University of Kentucky has been working on deciphering the Herculaneum scrolls for many years. He employs a different method of "virtually unrolling" damaged scrolls, using digital scanning with micro-computed tomography—a noninvasive technique often used for cancer imaging—with segmentation to digitally create pages, augmented with texturing and flattening techniques. Then they developed software (Volume Cartography) to virtually unroll the scroll.
Notably, the historical account of Plato being sold into slavery in his later years after running afoul of the tyrannical Dionysius is usually pegged to around 387 BCE. According to the newly deciphered Philodemus text, however, Plato's enslavement may have occurred as early as 404 BCE or shortly after the death of Socrates in 399 BCE.
"Compared to previous editions, there is now an almost radically changed text, which implies a series of new and concrete facts about various academic philosophers," Graziano Ranocchia, lead researcher on the project, said. "Through the new edition and its contextualization, scholars have arrived at unexpected interdisciplinary deductions for ancient philosophy, Greek biography and literature, and the history of the book.”
📜 We had a fascinating conversation w/ classicist Richard Janko & wanted to share "The Vesuvius Challenge" in which he participates as well to unlock and read entire scrolls of the burnt Herculanum Papyri.