Reading the Herculaneum Papyri

Imagine an American scientist appearing on an Italian podcast, and discussing complicated research concepts and philosophical history and ideas in fluent Italian. This woman is extraordinary.

Thank you for continuing these podcasts. They are interesting and informative.

Jeez Dr. Garrett, you really struck gold with Dr. Nicolardi...a great discourse!

Absolutely wonderful to hear from someone close to these new discoveries.

Been following this in the news for awhile, as you say it's a very exciting time for this field. Thanks for covering this!

New information suggests that the former Consul had illegally removed these scrolls after his term ended. A golden toilet in that little room was the first clue...

A poem about the Battle of Actium is featured in I, Claudius.

That was definitely worth the watch.

I love Napoli what a great city! I flew over Capri in a helo at 500 ft AGL it was a great memory I love Italy and Sicily and I’m not Italian btw Napoli has great architecture Bella Bella.

Thank you, Professor Ryan. This looks very promising.

This was an extremely interesting discussion- thank you for making this available to all of us laypersons who are watching the progress of the Vesuvius challenge with great excitement. One question I'd like an answer to is when are we going to get translations of the new part of Epicurus' "On Nature" and other texts for the general public? My understanding is that several parts of "On Nature" have been partially recovered, which greatly expands the very limited number of texts of Epicurus we have from Antiquity. It seems odd that these are not published. Do you have any information on this?

One thing I learned here is that when someone finished reading a scroll they left it with the last page on the outside. Maybe they had special librarian-slaves to do the rewind? How do you read a scroll? Maybe a video to walk us through it?

Get in touch with Voices of the Past please!

Very informative conversation, very interesting. This is so exciting. I can't wait to see what else they (hopefully) find in those scrolls over the coming years.

Great interview! I learned so much

This was amazing to hear about!

Great interview

Amazing. I can only recall the time an archaeologist friend of mine asked if I would help catalog and sort a tremendous amount of excavated fragments of Roman glass. I turned her down. It was the type of tedious task I was not prepared to attempt. The work on these scrolls is monumental and filled with anticipation.

This was interesting. I didn't know that there was work continuing on physically unrolling the scrolls or that so much had been read. The virtual unrolling is promising, but at the moment is more proof of concept than an established method. It's such a hard problem because papyrus has a very uneven multilayed surface and ink sinks into it. The most successful virtual unrolling so far was parchment with an ink containing metal, a much easier problem.

It would be my dream dor missing segments of the epic cycle to be uncovered in some of the scrolls, perhaps in scrolls yet to be unexcavated. Would also love any works on the Celtics, rhst bordered Rome. We know so little about their culture and faith considering their vastness and long history with rome.