Reading the Herculaneum Papyri: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

good afternoon i'm kenneth lapatin curative antiquities here at the getty villa and today we have a special treat for you both in the auditorium and on line three world-renowned experts will be speaking about the challenges of reading and understanding the carbonized papyrus scrolls from the villa de Pury at Herculaneum miraculously preserved by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 and rediscovered by Neapolitan excavators Deeping digging deep beneath the surface of the earth in the 1750s a few of these papyrus scrolls are on display here at the getty villa crossing the atlantic for the very first time and we are extremely grateful to our colleagues at the National Library in Naples for generously lending them to us for the loan exhibition buried by Vesuvius treasures from the villa de Pury as well as our other lenders who have provided us with sculptures frescoes and other historic materials the National Archaeological Museum in Naples the parco archaeological de alcalá know the bog lien libraries of the University of Oxford and the Metropolitan Museum of Art we are also deeply grateful to the Getty museums Villa council for the support of this exhibition and the ELISA and Elizabeth and Bruce Dunleavy and the spa Glee Family Foundation today's program is co-sponsored by the American Friends of Herculaneum and we are extremely pleased that members of both the American Friends and the British Friends of Herculaneum are here with us today including many board members and the president and treasurer of the American Friends Carol Matus and Rodger McFarlane who are here today and available to answer questions after the program if you are interested [Applause] if you're interested in joining the friends or learning more about our efforts to support the ongoing work at Herculaneum or of course you can just google American Friends of Herculaneum now for the main event each of our three speakers today could easily present to us for the entire afternoon or indeed for an entire semester I think and I could easily fill all available time today just by reading you the short abbreviated introductory Seavey's I received from them truly but so that we will have time for your questions in discussion at the end of the program these introductions will be excessively brief our first speaker today has come to us all the way from Brentwood David blank is professor of classics at UCLA a graduate of Yale and Princeton he has held numerous prestigious grants and awards including a Fulbright fellowship to Athens stints in Bonn Berlin Oxford and elsewhere here's one the Theodor Mommsen award for contributions to Herculaneum papper ology and is a principal investigator of the neh funded Phil Adiemus project his books and articles listed and even this short CV are too many to even delve into here but they address a wide range of Phil illogical philosophical and peper illogical issues professor blank will speak today on the early history of the papyri and past attempts to read them his title reading the Herculaneum papyri 1754 to 1864 please join me in welcoming professor David Glen ah there we go is this microphone on good thank you Ken thank you all for being here good afternoon so reading the Herculaneum papyri where does this start so in some ancient philosophical schools philosophy was not only a way of life it was a shared inquiry into truth we mostly think of this on the model of Socratic conversation but later philosophers envisaged even the Platonic school as working with books in the form of papyrus rolls we're even told that Plato's people Aristotle was often called the Academy's reader the one who would read aloud a text to be discussed don't get too impressed this is a job usually held by a slave however the Academy's model was thought in the Hellenistic tradition so after Plato's death to involve Plato or his successors conversing while walking in the various areas of the Academy not while sitting as these because some of these people are the first readers of the Herculaneum papyri perhaps resembled the group pictured here because in part the Epicureans at any rate were a group that prized shared inquiry it's usually been thought that the epicurean philosopher Phil Adiemus who was born sometime around 1:10 in what is now in Jordan and then came to Italy probably sometime in in the 70s BCE it's usually been thought that Phil Adiemus lived and set up such a philosophical School in the shadow of Vesuvius in Herculaneum in a grand seaside villa belonging to God Calpurnia's piezo whom cicero prosecuted in 55 BCE though a cultured man and a good philosopher Cicero laments that Phil Adiemus was unable to stop the perversion of the epicurean doctrine of Pleasant ease into one of debauchery of course we might say that it was not the best idea to put such a school at the foot of an active volcano well then again 3 million people currently live in Vesuvius red zone and as recent excavations have shown the villa was only built around 40 BCE when villa Dimas would have been about 70 years old so it's possible that his school was more likely in Naples and not in Herculaneum still as it turns out it was the eruption of Vesuvius that buried Herculaneum in volcanic mud after it killed with its pyroclastic flow of superheated air those of the population who failed to escape beforehand and were huddled in caves along the waterfront it was this same volcanic mud that preserved the cache of books practically the only such ancient books to survive antiquity in Europe the picture here shows Mount Vesuvius and the Sorrentine Peninsula from the International Space Station on January 1st 2013 this is an 18th century map of the gulf of the Gulf's of data and of naples and so we're talking about the area right here it turns out then that the only library from the ancient world bit found together with its books is in this sumptuous seaside villa at Herculaneum buried in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD and now known for its trove of about 800 papyrus rolls almost all of them works of epicurean philosophy with a few stoic books and a few very badly preserved Latin ones for good measure they probably were not part of the library but we're there for other reasons so this is some this is the computer-generated reconstruction that you can see upstairs in the exhibit nice place the villa was discovered by workers digging wells in 1750 tunnels were dug through it over the next four years so that statues candelabra wall paintings mosaics and so on could be removed and brought to the palazzo kara Monaco the summer home of the Neapolitan King at the end of that period of exploration of the villa which remained buried under 20 to 30 metres of volcanic mud hardened to a concrete consistency the Swiss engineer Col Weber drew an accurate plan of the villa or at least this one floor of the villa including the tunnels by which it had been explored and with annotations indicating what was found in various places the original of this plan can also be seen upstairs among the objects found here were book rolls they were discovered by excavators tunneling through the villa in October of 1750 - through October of 1754 while they were looking for art treasures such as the grand bronze statues which were first found in the theater of Herculaneum they were not looking for papyrus rolls I can tell you that for sure the first notice to the learning world of the discovery of the papyrus rolls was this letter pictured here from the curator of the antiquities of Herculaneum Camillo Pagani - a friend of his dr. Mead dated from Naples November 18th 1750 to and read by Mead to a meeting of the royal philosophical society in London whence it was published so you can see here that he wanted to publish it to illustrate a couple of lines of Latin characters that were found in the papyrus role it was the discovery of these characters that then led POD guarantee wealth poverty makes the claim for himself but then again he claims everything for himself who led people to think that these were not just lumps of charcoal but rather were ancient books so the discoveries that were made were recorded on vapers plan and also in the excavation leader Alcubierre --is excavation reports caps i that is travelling boxes of a ton of papyri and clumps or even pyramids of papyri were discovered in two points in points G & G on vapers plan and that was so really on opposite sides of the peristyle so for example here in the square peristyle and then here also in the long peristyle the garden peristyle further clumps of papyri were found in room 16 off the tablinum and in the tablinum itself so that's this area here that's the usual the usually very sumptuously decorated and in this case with with various intricate marbles and so on place where the master of the house would receive guests in the morning people who came to curry favor and that room one or two cabinets containing papyri were discovered but those cabinets then were unable to be salvaged they fell to pieces when they were touched and the papaya I taken out of them then there was room five which was found to be surrounded in shelving the room five discovered in 1754 disclosed by far the greatest number of papyri pedir neve described in some detail how he himself went down such a hero he went down spent whole days in the room digging out papyrus rolls with his bare hands sometimes so many at a time that he couldn't carry them all however much he exaggerated this probably was true but room five is that little room that we saw was likely a place where the villas philosophical books were stored readers on the other hand probably took books from there to read them in a nicer environment in the sunshine of the Paris tiles the tablinum then the ornate room pictured here in its malibu incarnation would have been ideally situated for readers because it came in between the two peristyle courts it was equipped with two cabinets in which books taken from the library could be stored for reading later or on the next day so if you were reading a book then you might keep it there so that you was easier for you to get at the next day you wouldn't have to go back into the dark room five plutarch so in the second century seee not without a certain implication that this kind of luxury was a display of wealth and the pushing of power describes Luke Alyssa's library so this was a friend of Cicero and many other Romans he describes Lucas's library accommodations as a kind of hotel and gymnasium serving Greek visitors to Rome note that the pretty neon which he also talks about so was also the Hestia or the sacred hearth of the city of Athens and a place where dining and congregating were done as was also the museum Cicero on the other hand thinks that the young lucullus whose library he uses to take out books when he's on vacation at his own villa in Tusculum should soon become acquainted with the library he's inherited from his father and should think of it as the most glorious of the things in his house when he encounters Cato in Luke Alyssa's library unexpectedly Cicero is surprised to see him not because he's surprised to see a scholar in a library but because he's surprised to see a scholar reading books in the library presumably there were so many and Cato was so excited to see them that he didn't even take the time to bring them out so they eventually both sit down there in the library rather than going to another place or outdoors and they have a lengthy conversation which is recorded fictionally for us by cicero in the third book on the moral ends seneca later on speaks of people who spend lots of money on beautiful bindings of books and on cedar and ivory shelves but don't care what's in their books so I spoke about two cabinets in which books could be stored in the tablinum this is a imaginative reconstruction based on the description given by the excavators of one such cabinet you can see here then the papyrus rolls stacked on top of one another basically and each one with a little tag called a syllabus that's the origin of our word telling you what's in it I also spoke about boxes of papyri traveling boxes so the excavation reports of Alcubierre indicate that the remains of two boxes of papyri were found which appeared to the workers to be oblong mounds of Earth mud and charcoal lumps and alongside these mounds were found the remains of metal parts hinges and handles these are galavis reconstructions of the two rectangular caps I or traveling boxes in which 101 papyri were found I'm guessing that the Latin papyri of the villa were in these travelling boxes and also in in in another one then I'll show you in a second and because then when people would leave to go hunting or go into the country or whatever then they would take papyri with them whether the pyre I they took with them we're not the epicurean philosophical books but rather Latin pyre I a couple so at least one of which is a poem but many of which we don't really know what they were because they're too badly preserved so this is the other kind of capsule and this is in a in an ancient wall painting and so you can see here so a tablet showing presumably wax writing and then this is the traveling box itself it had a cover the papyri were stuck into it and on and it's made of leather presumably and could be carried on the shoulder of some slave who was accompanying the expedition and now the click there we go so in the library room of the villa room five on Beiber's plan were found bookshelves on all four sides and a two-sided reading table was put in the middle the bookshelves in this room are said by the excavators to have been made of a variety of woods artistically combined so intaglio and so on and they were topped with cornices this is a reconstruction of one niche of such a bookshelf but not from Herculaneum not from our villa but rather from an excavation in Rome but you can see here the way it goes so you'd have this this shelf here it would be divided up into round niches by these columns which are really very sweet and then the name of the author of the book would be put below it in this case Apollonius of Tyana the famous conjurer I suppose you could say conjurer and guru maybe gurus better actually so the finds from the villa excavation were brought to the Royal Palace at Portage she which is right next door where one wing was set up as the museum here : NZ it was at that Museum that the early work on the poplar I was done by panini piaggio and others not always to the best effect in 1777 King Ferdinand Oh decided to move his collections of Antiquities including the music the museum here : NZ to Naples to occupy the Palazzo de lys to D the the palace of studies which had previously housed the university and that's why it has that name that is now the Museo archeological not sonali of naples the extended process of transferring the antiquities gave rise to this fanciful reimagining by louise rome they prey engraved by robear do they so he imagined that all happening at once in a grand procession this did not happen but so many things didn't happen we really want to be picky when the rolls the papyrus rolls were first discovered they were a little used to anyone the first ones to be discovered at another site at the villa of papaya in Oplontis were burnt by workers in their home stoves because they felt that they were charcoal and I suppose that's useful badly carbonized and extremely fragile the rolls could not be opened and read so they were less useful to scholars except the cold ones so that those worth these are the papyri that you can see upstairs and you can see the condition in which they are currently so this is the stick on which this papyrus roll was wound and you can just make out that there are any number of layers rolled up here and then this one is relatively well-preserved if you wanted to unroll this which you may or may not be able to then the first thing you would have to do is probably to take off some of this outer what they sometimes referred to as a cortex or a bark and then eventually find the place where the papyrus roll itself could begin and begin to be unrolled this one's pretty good these are somewhat less good as you can see this one you can see very well that it has a number of a large number of windings and you can also see the little stick the umbilicus in the middle but it's only about 2 inches long and so it's broken off from another from a larger part of the roll it's probable I suppose that that other part well that other part either is in similar condition only longer or it's a much larger pile of dust dust is a big factor in the papyri at one point when the papyri were hung on the walls of the of the library or of the museum there was somebody paid entirely every day to go around and sweep up the papyrus dust that fell off them now eventually the hero of our story will come to Naples and that's piaggio father Antonio piaggio and he then eventually had engraved some of his own drawings illustrating the conditions of the papyri which were given to him to work on so here you have a broken one sort of like the piece that we saw before here we have yet another one that's in pretty difficult condition and one here as well you can see this one's already beaten these are beginning to flake off in various ways which is also not so good and then here he's showing the end position where you can see now the wooden rod or umbilicus on which this was wound and so he's actually drawn that separately and then here is the syllabus so the label that was attached to this faced with such daunting lumps of coal Pavini entertained various friends of the king who gave suggestions and even made experiments on papyrus rolls so one of them has become a famous object of well fascination or derision I suppose he was the príncipe the Sun Severo and he figured smart guy that Quicksilver liquid mercury would slide effortlessly between the layers of papyrus you've all had these little games where you have a lump a little ball of mercury and you slide it around to put it in through a maze and you see how quickly it moves and how easily so he thought that they would slide and it would slide effortlessly between the layers of papyrus allowing them to be separated and so he built a box which would support a roll upright and allow him to pour mercury over it Biagio considered this as a part of pad Ernie's butchery of the papyri uses that word with MA cello and he sketched it in his memorial of 1769 so here you have the baffles that would have held the roll upright this is the papyrus roll itself and then you have the open top by which to pour the mercury now this is an imaginative reconstruction of this experiment I'm not quite sure why he's shown leaning his head away I don't think mercury smells or anything so but anyway you can see him pouring out the mercury into this hole in the top of the box so this was done the pouring of the mercury was done the box was left for a time while the mercury would do its thing when the box was opened it's not that the birds began to sing right but the papyrus turned out to have been crushed to dust by the density of the mercury which is a very high specific gravity so a non-starter soon pavani as well mm we could say curator well that was his net his title as curator of the finds began to take a knife to the rolls and there's his knife hmm see so we take the knife to the rolls he would cut them in half and then he would use the butt end of the knife so he he was very efficient right so he used the sharp end of the knife and the butt end of the knife the butt end of the knife so he would hold the half of the papyrus in his hand he would take the butt end and he would pound it to crush the interior of the papyrus and that he would then pour off into the toilet why well because if you take the interior of the very interior of the papyrus then it has a very small radius and that means they're only a couple of letters visible and paternity didn't read Greek or anything like that nor did the king but the king who has was the only sovereign in Europe who owns papyrus rolls from antiquity wanted to show them off and he did so this is the kind of process that we're talking about here so and we we have it described by padrone's mortal enemy piaggio so in his never ceasing outrage against panini piaggio wrote then from the second wonderful and very abundant find ie the first or all of the discoveries of 1754 he pattern II chose all those roundest and most and best turned in their shape and whose material was of the best quality things well known to him from the butchering of the first discovery and before my very eyes he put them aside for himself shut himself in a room for a long time in the mornings and during the day coming to the museum for this very purpose at dawn and in the afternoon immediately after lunch or elles taking a rest he would still work by lamplight in the evening and with his Genoese knife in hand he turned them at his leisure into so many little boats like those in Egypt he would cut them first from top to toe empty out their insides and eviscerate enough of them to find the flat leaf broader than the others toward the outside of the role which was legible or interesting according to the Oracle of the above-mentioned don nicola in yarra assistant and great professor of things greek Raja was very alive to the pretensions of some of the people he had to deal with all the rest was reduced to powder and thrown into the toilet these little boats did not see the light for a long time then after the departure of the catholic king yuri católica charles the seventh of bourbons departure in 1759 to become charles the third of spain no fewer than fourteen boxes of these little boats were brought out and these are currently on display to be shown to foreigners and thereby I'm not sure whether the shamelessness in his face or the ignominy of such a great Museum is the greater among those fragments there is one which was recently given to me so that I could imitate its writing and engrave it in copper plate which I did as well as my artistry and Industry allowed such a humble man this here you'd have to imagine this black or dark brown but this is an end on view of a paper mache model of a papyrus roll made by our next speaker Richard Janko showing the cuts made into each side of the roll here and here and the uncut middle referred to as the marrow or middle lo hee is a top view of the same piece just so you get an idea of what this process might have looked like and then a schematic sort of drawing of it so this was the result when eventually either because he was tired of scraping out the insides of his rolls or as piaggio suggests because he had trouble cutting all the way through them Pavini would cut in on opposite sides of a roll then pull off two of what piaggio referred to as Barca or Egyptian boats leaving the central core intact so we take the whole roll we cut in on both sides pull off these two shells or sometimes they didn't seem to want to come off together and so you'd cut them in half and then you have also left over the middle part you can see that on Richards model as well and here's another so as you can see on the interior of this there would have been writing so the column of writing of the papyrus and eventually this could be copied and then scraped off and then the layer underneath it could also be copied so in that process especially beginning in the 1820s when they were running out of rolls that they could unroll easily the personnel of the oficina who always needed work because they always needed to be paid they took the multi-layered out of fragments to work on and they would draw the innermost layer then scrape it off to reveal the layer underneath it draw it in turn and then scrape it off until what remains was a thin piece at the outside which they thought wouldn't be able to be scraped any further and that would then be drawn and mounted on thick paper for preservation and here's such a last leaf as they call them ultimate folio near the beginning of filadyne is book on rhetoric book four and it is upstairs in the villa exhibition right now so you can examine it more closely here is the Neapolitan drawing that's this one here on this side on the left sorry you're right here's the Neapolitan drawing of that last leaf fragments seven out of seven alongside the layer which was above it fragment six of seven until that layer was scraped away to reveal the last one although fragment seven on the left was drawn with artificially straight sides to mimic the margins of this column which is preserved in its full length while it's fine its full full line length while fragment six on the right was drawn with its actual uneven sides it's easy to see that the shapes are the same as is the damage in the middle of the bottom down here and so these were directly one on top of the other and that much it should be obvious so here are the residual or some of the residual of POD Arnie's method which were illustrated along with sketches of whole papyri on the bottom in Andrea de oreos 1825 guidebook to the oficina de Pury 18:53 already giuseppe al zaman ii who was keeper an expert on early christian manuscripts at the vatican library and also by Royal appointment scrren ocular of the kingdom of the two sicilies in naples convinced the king to request that the vatican send someone to assist with the unrolling of the papyri and for that job he already had someone in mind named with the general his father Antonio piaggio della scuola PA whom he recommended as the only man alive who could succeed in the task a distinguished and ingenious restorer of illuminated manuscripts in the vatican library as well as papal scribe jojo arrived in naples in early July of 1753 at first for a short time and then he got an extension namely for the rest of his life he arrived in Naples where the curator Camillo Pagani made clear to him that he was unwelcome Jojo became the hero of the early history of the papyri and this portrait by Aquila Giovanni was hung in the museum by Royal Command of ferdinando ii of bourbon on the 12th of May 1854 piaggio himself in a memorial that he wrote later on illustrated the conditions in which he found papyri after the depredations of padorin II so here we see a closed book roll another already opening by itself so that's here than here and then a central middle re wrong button a central medulla or central portion and then a piece from an outer half cylinder or a Egyptian boat and then in the bottom row we have the innermost layers of some pieces of this bark from the outside of the papyrus role and they are just in fragments so opposed to the summing summoning of help from the Vatican Pavini gave piaggio the task of working on the central portions of the rolls he had cut open but then he considered these cylinders useless since they would yield only a small surface of writing if they were cut open the way he had done with other whole rolls he kept them in a box of his own design we're told derisively called la caja mágica so the magician's chest by Piaggio who illustrated here in his memorial of 1769 so this was thought by Padilla to be safe for piaggio give him an impossible job keep him out of your hair Jojo then turned around and having decided that picking pieces off the outside of this was no better than what pattern he had been doing and was destroying them he decided to try to unroll them whole and so he invented his famous machina the machine which allowed him to unroll the maddali at least some of the best of them continuously so this is probably the first version of his machina you can see a late version of it which also show you a picture of upstairs and so you've got a little carriage here to hold the papyrus roll which is then also supported by bands here and then it's attached by silk threads here and then ultimately will be drawn up into a slit in this top piece onto a rod of wood and wound backwards on that rod and here you have a drawing again of piaggio at work on his machine you can see he's got a number of other rolls below here which are in a box very much like the one in which they were found first so when the papyrus finished unrolling on the first versions of Piaggio mishnev JoJo's machine it was rolled up backwards on the rod at the top it was then taken off and stored in that condition and in fact it was stored it's so sorry the very first one that he unrolled he cut up into into pieces so that it can be displayed in crystal frames to the Kings friends but after that he kept them in this condition and they were kept that way until at least 1802 this is again a drawing of the top view of that version of Cal Joe's machine you can see something about what this would look like if it was unrolled continuously because this is the fifth papyrus unrolled by piaggio it's a copy of one of the books of Philip II Masson vices namely on flattery use no flattery was advice did you and you can see that mallesh II one of the that is their drawers the draftsman here has now drawn it in its entirety column after column until the very end where you have so the book ends is a little bit of empty space and then the title felidae mu parry cocky own and so on and piaggio himself drew two drawings of the last columns in 1761 62 but the whole papyrus was still stored on a stick in 1782 when cow Joe's inventory was made and mallesh she drew it as he saw it one continuous length of papyrus later versions of pure Joe's machine drew the leading edge of the papyrus up using silk threads attached two knurled screws each time it reached the top of the frame it was cut with a sharp knife drawn and stored this is the machine as you'll see it upstairs now that we've seen something of attempts to open pop IRA let's go back in time a bit father piaggio died in 1796 having open 17 pop I ride together with his assistants merrily in 1798 the royal family took shelter in its second capital Palermo to escape the jacobins of the parthenon pian revolution at least one of whom was Pasquale baffi professor of Greek paleography who was working to edit for Herculaneum papyri the papaya I was shipped off to accompany the king however the boxes in which they were sent off we never opened and as the revolution had been put down in 1799 and its leaders hanged in the marketplace the boxes of papyri were returned to by ion in January of 1802 their return was awaited at Porta G by John hater 1756 to 1818 the Canon and ordinary to the Prince Regent of Great Britain who was granted permission to organize a new the work of the oficina de papyri and financed to do so by the Prince Regent hater worked in Portage II from January of 1802 until the imminent arrival of Napoleon's army in February 1806 after reluctantly allowing a chemist diet on oh la Pira to experiment on some papyrus fragments with what he called vegetable gas which atomized them hater set to work himself he learns from three of pyaar joe's workers the art of unfolding the book rolls then he took on ten new men including two draftsman and he put the Spurs to the all workings of the oficina assigning both an unroll er and a draftsman to each role to be unrolled hater selected roles for unrolling whenever the small brush which they wetted and applied in this case to the outside surface of the manuscript caused the exterior fold to raise itself singly in a detached state from the next layer under it that manuscript most completely justified the however simple Byam or entire separation of each fold in the volume especially from the middle part this is quoting hater hater and that worked even to the end and by a more it was also justified by a more entire preservation of letters both in form and in color such promising roles could then be fastened with silk threads to the Machine of piaggio and unrolled by tightening the threads very gradually while loosening the outermost layer of papyrus with a fine needle and supporting the material where it was weak by gluing gold beaters skin to the back of it each segment of papyrus was then given to the draftsman to copy the draftsman drawing was checked by an academic who knew Greek and a fee of one Carlino was recorded as payment to both the unroll er and the copies for each complete line correctly transcribed since hater paid each man a monthly salary that he knew was wholly inadequate to live on each one had an incentive to complete as much as they could and also to push the partner to greater achievement then the drawing was assigned to an engraver who made the copper plates which would eventually be printed when the papyrus was published on the haterz direction the oficina unrolled over 200 book roll cores in less than four years which is rather an increase over the 17 unrolled in the 44 years of the offer china's first incarnation once hater went off to palermo he got into a spot of difficulty with the local authorities something to do with a rather young novice nun found in his hotel room and persona non-grata had to return to england despite the relative success of PR joe's machine in the early 19th century others thought they could improve on the method one such was the Turin Jian ancient historian Friedrich Carr Ludovic Sickler who offered his services to unroll the papyri which had been given to the Prince Regent but King George the fourth using a new method it sometimes said that he actually received that the Prince Regent received 18 papaya in exchange for 18 kangaroos so seeker had the idea of making an unrolling machine similar to that of Jia Joe but he destroyed everything he touched seven of them so and then further experiments were made by Sir Humphrey Davy who was a real chemist and his experiments with nitrous oxide had brought him great notoriety and started a party fad in England of the early 19th century here we have a lecture of by him and demonstration on nitrous oxide his experiments with papyri were partially successful but again you can see that multiple layers this is one layer this is another layer and so the text is interrupted as they disturb the results of this and that became something of a problem here's another one in Latin text so after pyaar Joe's death the papyrus unrolled by piaggio and left on the stick on to which it had been wound in reverse atop the machine would be taken off the stick and cut like this one the third papyrus unrolled by piaggio into pieces of four to six columns in width so as to be more manageable to work on and to store on the later version of the machine the papyrus had to be cut by the man unrolling it when it reached the top of the machines frame so here is one column out of that piece of papyrus and then since we're talking about readers and reading of the papyri this is the first drawing of this papyrus column one of two preserved copies of the second book of Phyllis's rhetoric and the third papyrus opened by piaggio with his machine this drawing was among those in the hands of Pasquale baffi when he was executed for his role in the Neapolitan revolution in 1799 it was returned to the museum in 1808 when a pension was granted to his widow this is the second copy of that papyrus was drawn under haters direction and then eventually brought to Oxford University where it still resides and then those those columns those parm drawings in Oxford were then published in Oxford in 1825 in the meantime when the oficina de Pape Erie was reorganized again during the rule of napoleon's man murat in 1807 under the leadership of Monsignor Racine rozina Archbishop of Potts Wally one of the first tasks was to redo the drawings that had been taken away to England a task accomplished by the designer Tory alongside their usual work of opening and drawing new book rolls then they were given to academic e so academics who knew Greek and tried to make an addition as you can see this is rather rough work this is a somewhat less rough addition alongside a Latin translation there was also a commentary on this in the meantime some Neapolitan drawings were engraved and published and this is the first column of the first one published in 1793 this book which is owned by the Getty a copy of which is owned by the Getty is upstairs in the exhibition you can see I think this very page then it was published here you can see the way the conscientious editor put in the things that were not visible in the papyrus in red and then some things that were really not visible in the papyrus he put in as dots and then he made a Latin translation alongside it eventually after 1860s our starting in 1862 all the copper plates that had been made that weren't published because the work went so slowly were published all together in a series of another 11 volumes here's a modern addition of this very column some other pieces so the outs of the little Egyptian boats then would have been drawn in this way and some of them were then mounted here you can see that some of these obviously belong together but some of them don't this one for example this is quite different so retracing the story of the pieces in this frame is rather complicated and we won't be able to go into it all but this was mounted in one piece so as one fragment but the top part and the bottom part actually belonged to two entirely different books this is a piece of filadyne missus rhetoric this is a piece of Filipinos on music and this one is poppy is also drawn under another papyrus number so this is the drawing made of the column from which the top of the previous picture is all that survives so like the philosophy which created the book rolls they're unrolling was a collaborative process one man was assigned to operate the unrolling machine another to draw each column as it came off the machine a third man supposed to examine the drawing comparing it with the original the drawing was then given to a fourth man whose job it was to transfer the drawing to copper plate so that it could be published and yet another man sometimes two also checked the first prints made from the copper plates to see whether everything had been done accurately this is another drawing and then the first proof sheet of the copper plate from that drawing and you can see the Corrections that have been made here some of them inject all that is did this really say RI or did this one really say R it's not clear reading was still an independent and individual occupation though and it still is although the work of constructing attacks is so difficult that we often call on friends to lend an eye or to lend an opinion thank you very much thank you so much David for that thorough survey of the earliest reading our next speaker Richard Janko will bring us up to the present day he is Gerald F else distinguished University professor of classical studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor professor janko's previously taught at University College London UCLA Columbia st. Andrews and Cambridge University where he received his doctorate he is the author of nine books with several others in press and well over a hundred articles and scholarly reviews professor Janko is not only a renowned philologist and papper ologist but also an expert in Aegean prehistory in Homer in the history of criticism among his many many awards I mentioned only a few he was elected a foreign member of the Academy of Athens in 2017 has held Fulbright Guggenheim and Institute of Advanced Study grants is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences winner of the American Philosophical Association Award for merit and that's just the tip of the iceberg please join me in welcoming welcoming professor Richard Yanko to the getty villa [Applause] well thank you very much for that introduction and thanks to you all for being here I'll move through briskly so in 1955 J paul Getty fluent in many languages as was essential in fact to his success in business and well-versed in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome published a novella entitled a journey from Corinth in his book a collector's choice which he wrote jointly with Ethel Levine and in this story Getty imagined a Greek architect a certain Glaucus of Corinth advising one of the richest Nobles in Rome P so on how to build a great villa on the Romantic Bay of Naples and how to fill it with the finest bronze sculptures from his homeland mr. Getty unlike most of us had the resources both to fulfill his fantasy and to share it with us as our presence here attests and it's just wonderful to see all that this amazing exhibit finally in well a replica of the place where it was found he would have been very happy indeed about today's event he certainly knew that pieces summer residence at Herculaneum the villa de Pury contained not only priceless bronzes but also the only library from classical antiquity that was buried in conditions that ensured its preservation the library was found between 1750 to and 1754 it consists entirely of books that were otherwise lost and a contemporary per Danny whom we heard about tells us that about 800 rolls were found this numbers been hard to confirm but is likely to be right and based on David's hypothesis about the hundred books in the cases being Latin ones we probably had around 700 Scrolls originally in this find there was no catalogue of these books until they could be opened nobody had any idea what they might contain and almost 300 Scrolls or parts of scrolls are still waiting for that day some of the papyri were found outside in the garden others in the tably know more nearby or in the inner Paris style and you can have great fun rediscovering these fine spots are so-called within the ground plan of the Getty Villa and there's the two Blenheim whose role David eloquently explained the most intriguing fine spot was of course the library room number five the small room with shelves like a set of open mailboxes on which papyrus rolls were piled up in triangular piles and this was and the actual storeroom for the books nearby there were small busts like that of Epicurus indicating which authors were on that particular shelf and Cicero tells us at one point that he studied under a bust of Aristotle in one of the Roman libraries in the bay we can even tell which way round some of the papyri lay on their shelves the role that I'm now publishing which I'll show you later is much harder to read in its bottom three or four lines because that end of it was pointing outwards on the shelf and was darkened by 10,000 ancient suns another intriguing feature of the villa marked on my plan up here is a room with a semicircular array of perhaps fifty to a hundred seats entered from a wide Lobby with three doors in front I'm not sure whether anyone has noted its significance I suspect that it was a lecture room if the villa contained a lecture room located not far from the library we're surely entitled to wonder whether the villa contained even more books than those that have already been recovered as you know were books in Latin as well like this major Roman epic about the Battle of Actium and the death of Cleopatra which was in at least nine books nine book roles and I identified some new fragments of this among all drawings in Oxford a few years back the Latin papyri remained under explored but most of the books are of course in Greek the nucleus of this collection was assembled elsewhere probably in Athens the oldest books that are in it were actually quite old they go back almost to the lifetime of the philosopher Epicurus to no later than about 260 BCE as the handwriting of a few volumes reveals they still have the epigraphic form of Omega there are numerous works by the followers of Epicurus and the manuscript on the Left we can tell from the even from this drawing was written in the mid mid to late 3rd century BCE as the handwriting proves the one of the more amusing items in the collection is the book of which the title was recently found by Zeno of Sidon in reply to kratos's essay against xenos essay on geometrical proofs and so this this has has a good claim to be the first reply to a hostile book review something you get in the New York Times every every Sunday most of the collection though consists of the works by Phil Adiemus and Phil Adiemus was the teacher as we heard a Virgil who wrote the you need and he also influenced Horace as my current project actually confirms the philosophical library was I believe Phil Adiemus own personal collection and includes one item a copy of his history of Plato's Academy with additional paragraphs written on the back of the role clearly an author's draft even if the handwriting is that of an amanuensis rather than of the author himself this is suggestive that P so once owned the villa himself and that the manuscripts were still there during the eruption because his descendants owned the villa if you're wondering how I got interested in this when I started out as an archaeologist in 1984 I published a controversial book where I argued that a summary of the lost book of Aristotle's Poetics about which Umberto Eco coincidentally at the same time wrote his book than his novel the name of the rose still existed in a manuscript in Paris soon afterwards I heard that a Herculaneum papyrus containing a discussion of Aristotle's Poetics existed and I went to Naples to investigate and when I got there I found that the claim was partly true and that there were huge numbers of papyri still sitting there which were unpublished because they were so hard to read at that time the only microscopes used light reflected from the Sun you remember well you don't remember most of you that kind of microscope because the ink is black and the background is black you could see the letters only by tilting the papyrus in the light so that it would fall across them but of course the head of the microscope and your own head obscured nearly everything within its own shadow undaunted I went to work and have subsequently published four papyrus rolls from the collection this may not sound like very much but wait till you hear what effort it takes to reconstruct and to publish them the conditions greatly improved in 1995 when the first microscopes with a light around the lens arrived simple innovation but there it is even now of course you still see only a few letters at a time fewer than those probably slightly more than that it's very hard to find where you are in the text and I spend most of my time there losing my place and finding it but this this work is the most intellectually challenging thing I've ever done it even beats publishing an archaeological site in 1999 a team from Brigham Young University led by Steve Boras imaged the whole collection in ultraviolet light using technology that NASA developed for viewing distant and very dark planets and at last we heard images that could be studied away from Naples this one shows a piece from the book of Philemon the nature of poetry that I'm now publishing its title is on poet it's conjectural title is on poems to the papyrus of an poems - was originally 17 yards long I thought about bringing the model but I don't think this room would be large enough to unroll it it contained 222 columns this is the only time I came close to occupying a house where there was a table large enough to unroll the model but even so it was in two goes and the end of it is there and it fell on the floor and then came up again like this and then there was more of it on the floor the other side um but the making of model was actually very important to facilitate its reconstruction this was not my house of course I put the roll back together by combining all the broken pieces that are in the same distinctive handwriting called hand eight and luckily this is the only manuscript in hand 8 the next step was to measure the circumference --is of each piece after finding the ones in the same handwriting because of course the circumference is get smaller towards the middle of the roll and this greatly helps one to place them and six different papyri with different numbers makeup on poems to the outside of which was cut off in order to open it and you can see of course that the outer pieces were removed first archival research tells us but by piaggio and his assistant before 1763 the middle part was one of the pieces why is this not working one of I have my own one of the pieces oh no that's not working either the where's my stick that would do the circumference is gets smaller and the ones in the middle were unrolled by piaggio and his assistant oh yes there we go in 1763 to five and then the final bit was run rolled by hater in 1802 and one has to do quite a bit of work in the archives to verify the dates but it's fun and so this we owe this papyrus to piaggio himself the outer parts as I said were cut off into stacks of fragments leaving this role in the middle scholars then published these fragments but they published them in backwards order not understanding that it was first the innermost one which is nearest to the end of the roll it was only in the mid-1980s that the french scholar daniel de lara understood that you have to interleave pieces from the two sides of the roll and arrange them in alternating backwards order to reconstruct the outer parts the surface of the papyrus is not flat the folds were burned into it by the volcano and to flatten it is to destroy it and parts of different layers are often visible at the same time you can see the ink here does not marry up with the ink here and this phenomenon can be deeply misleading so in working on these I found it essential not only of course to use the multispectral images from Brigham Young but also to make my own drawing I I copy the start off by copying these images but then I have to annotate my own notebook on squared paper recording the transitions between the layers an example of how the images are misleading are these little black dots which are actually holes not ink so I note the empty margins and many other details as I go along and I use notebooks because loose leaves get lost and the problem of the two-dimensional nature of the images is being solved by using reflectance transformation imaging where you take many photographs of the papyrus of the piece of papyrus from different angles and combine them together digitally but the files are immense and they are not stable and it's very very time consuming to make these images the whole collection needs to be imaged that way but studying the original remains absolutely indispensable one has to measure the circumference is very accurately in order to establish where in the role the fragments belong so here's some typical notes on those measurements an Iran points to I had the luck that fill Adiemus rebuts arguments that he already summarized in on poems book 1 which i reconstructed with fair level of success and brought out in 2002 so I was able to establish a series of verbal parallels between book 1 on the left and book 2 on the right and these are the words that actually overlap and then down here I have the circumference --is so you can see that the order corresponds with the circumference is reducing from fifteen point nine to twelve and a half in this particular part of the table I was also able to study the sheets from which each papyrus roll is glued together and as these sheets are a fairly similar length they serve as a check on the other methods of reconstruction the papyrus turns out to contain exactly 100 sheets it was at first 70 sheets and then a further 30 sheets which were copied separately were glued afterwards and this is actually that join it's cut to follow the margin obeying what pathologist called masses law so we know this is a secondary join the text is very hard to get right first you have to read it which is not easy even where it's well preserved of course it's all in capitals like certain presidential tweets and also there are no no spaces between the words he hasn't got to that yet squared paper a pencil and an eraser the high-tech essentials for this work the eraser is more important than the pencil I prepare the drawings from the photographs and I annotate them in presence of the original and I do it about four times and so you can see there what a bad draftsman I am the word division in Greek is actually has very strict rules and they help with the reconstruction at the right hand side of the lines you need to count the letters to avoid mistakes in filling in the holes and the scribes actually did were very careful to justify the right hand side of the column you can see they even crowd the letters along the right hand side so the images can be studied at very high magnification on big screens and the scribe also Punk'd this particular scribe has more punctuation than any other ancient scribe that I know which actually helps one read the text it's faint it's in a different lighter ink added afterwards I think one obviously has a lot of holes in the papyrus but you can use electronic databases like with the Souris lingua Gaikai or the online little and got to help one find missing words I check printouts of my draft against the original so that I make sure I verify each difficult letter and my first readings and supplements are normally wrong here I thought this said prata rice it actually says Fattah rice so it's definitely not prata Royce and it takes patience and persistence to read the traces right even before the holes get filled in when they can be filled in and that is far from invariably the case so here's a quick example of how the text gets improved Francesco's board au lait in 1976 was the first person to try to edit most of these papyri Gompertz had done some in in 1891 but not very much and one particular column that I'm going to show you this was all of it that spord own a read and just a few letters and this is my first drawing of this and you can see already that this is a row and not a thigh but that's based on the photograph in my printout of 2009 I'd identified a parallel with book 1 where Phil Adiemus quotes from Homer's Iliad and I therefore was able to fill in quite a bit more here are these letters shown in the edition of book 1 and so you can see that finally I managed to combine these two fragments which are actually in different cut segments but displaced by the multiple layers I actually was able to combine them into a text so the instead of saying prata Royce this says an photo Royce just there oh dear this thing is doing other things than it should so I'm fatter ice that meaning both instead of previous so this is the result and you can see these are two different segments of papyrus corn each a 11 as they call it and corn each a 10 these were hung in different framed segments on the walls of the museum until the 1860s and here's the present state of this papyrus as it will appear in January in the publication of book 2 and I got a whole lot out of this paragraph it's actually completely coherent and the work is like putting together a mosaic it's truly fascinating and absorbing you have to be very patient it takes a while but one gets there in the end like the snail crossing the brick and meanwhile I get immense pleasure from recovering the thoughts of the Ancients in their actual words on poems too as I said amounts to two hundred and twenty two columns of text it's I think I'm currently editing the proof of page five hundred and something and I'm not quite at the end much of it is surprisingly complete this passage is about where the birds can talk so we've got swallows and parrots and nightingales here I'm still understanding it a little bit more even in the proof stage I'm having to make a few changes and there are large chunks at the very end which are extremely complete this puts together two different columns 210 211 and here fill Adiemus is reporting the views of an unknown hitherto unknown critic called pal sim occurs on how you need to mix and consonants to make a poem sound better his he actually has a whole hierarchy of vowels and consonants ah is the most euphonious e is considerably worse and of course among the consonants l is is wonderful and M and n are quite sonorant as well whereas those pesky stops really are a pest a bother and you don't want to have too many T's and peas and things like that and the worst things of all are the aspirates th and th well no I forget I forgot the worst of all is s so it's very interesting theory this man was a musician musical theorist and Phil Adiemus won't believe doesn't believe a word he says but he does report it we badly need more well-qualified people to work on the papyri because new techniques and new technologies are constantly making it easier to do that and there is a lot to do but I think we shouldn't leave the other books that undoubtedly remain in the unexplored areas of the villa at the mercy of the next eruption by Vesuvius there hangs in my office in Michigan by coincidence this map a map of 1908 showing recent lava flows from the top of the mountain the villa is over here in the lava flows of the 1630s nothing flowed over it since then but in geological time that's not very long there is not time to be lost if there are if we are to get more books out so thank you very much [Applause] [Applause] thank you so very very much Richard so now as we do a quick technical changeover you have a sense of yesterday and today how much effort has been put into trying to recover the scrolls read them understand them the mistakes the corrections the perseverance the patience this year brain power applied to this our third speaker I'm pleased to introduce Brent and seals distinguished alumni professor and chair of computer science at the University of Kentucky founder of the Center for visualization and director of the digital restoration initiative a graduate of the University of wisconsin-madison a former visiting scientist at Google he has since earlier this month a fellow in residence at the Getty conservation Institute here in Los Angeles his groundbreaking work I think many of you have seen featured on 60 minutes the BBC and numerous other news outlets he has recently received major awards further than the National Endowment for the Humanities and the mellon foundation for the digital restoration of the Herculaneum papyri I am extremely grateful to him and his team from the University of Kentucky as I am to our previous two speakers for their contributions to the exhibition to its catalog to Brent and his team for their generous help in mounting the exhibition and in producing our in gallery video which many of you seen which is also on the exhibition website please welcome to the podium dr. Brent seals [Applause] does anybody know my password I think I remember thank you very much Kent for the introduction I have the pleasure of taking up the last spot standing in between you and the the drinks we were gonna have in the plaza so I'm not going to talk about how I became interested in this Zelda you will see some history but a good story might be that I answered a cry for help from these therapists that these men invariably have to visit in their in the work that they do I recently did move to California and I'll tell you that I was a little bit surprised at the traffic although I'm you know we do have traffic in Kentucky but I haven't seen any of the slow moving vehicle signs on the 405 I also am astounded at the beauty of the the misty morning and you know in Kentucky we also have but I'm eager to be closer to some of the best wines in America and the world and I would just like to invite you all to come and taste some of Kentucky's wine so let me begin by doing something that computer scientists do which is to start recursively and that is to take yesterday today and tomorrow and divide it again into yesterday today and tomorrow for my talk but I will make that interval be much shorter because I'm a computer scientist what you're seeing here is the first experiment that I did on the idea of virtual unwrapping and on the left you'll see the machine I used to scan a proxy that I made and on the right you'll see the data that I acquired from that machine this was a medical-grade CT scanner in the basement of the hospital at the University of Kentucky and what we did with this data was that we were able to figure out how to see the inside of something without opening it and use software after the scanning to be able to unfurl the geometry of what was inside to recover the writing without any physical restoration this is dependent on software on scanning on physics on geometry and as you heard from before geometry might be something we could help with it turns out there are some things in the history of Herculaneum that could actually use an engineer and a computer scientist and so as I got interested in in this area I realized that a collaborative approach with an idea like virtual unwrapping could end up providing a very fruitful approach a second experiment here shows the proxy that I made actually on papyrus this time and on the right the data from a more detailed CT scanner which becomes then the basis for the process of virtual unwrapping and from that data alone it's possible to produce a reading on the top from the photograph in from the data on the bottom that you're seeing in in loop and the photograph for comparison basically showing in these really examples the possibility of virtual unwrapping and the promise of that idea for something like Herculaneum now you have to understand the timeline here yesterday today tomorrow if we take the two thousand years of Herculaneum history and cut it in half and as a computer scientist I will round off the authorship date of Beowulf to about a thousand okay and we cut that in half again again a binary tree computer science 500 250 125 we have Vesuvius five levels deep in the binary subdivision of the 2000 year interval on the right hand side you do the same and all of that becomes yesterday and what becomes today is since the BlackBerry or for those of you who don't remember the BlackBerry the first iPhone in 2006-7 is the yesterday that I'm talking about now at the time that I was doing work with antiquities and and the subject of Herculaneum came up I was actually working with full manuscripts and the idea of imaging those manuscripts it was due to a a gentleman who actually preceded me that I became educated about Herculaneum and the beauty of these damaged things in 2005 richard Janko actually took me personally to Herculaneum and he allowed me to enter with him at the library and he showed me these scrolls and also the Alpha Chi nough where the work by gentlemen like David and Richard happens and it was then and only then that I became educated about the amazing damage that had been done and also the promise of virtual unwrapping if it could be realized on a her collection as valuable and precious as circulating we took photos we we began to think about how we might convert the proxy examples that we had done into something that could actually approach the complexity of Herculaneum and I began to conceive of this idea of moving away from piaggio machine in the physical idea and moving toward something that could be done completely virtually we began that work in 2005 and then in 2009 we were able finally to take a real authentic Herculaneum scroll put it in a scanner and collect data and you're seeing video from that era the institut de false has six Scrolls two of which are intact and through their collaboration and with the help of monsieur daniel de lat we were able to make a computed tomography image which is a three-dimensional scan of everything inside to intact scrolls and this is the first radiograph that was ever produced from that work in 2009 you'll see the container on the outside the bulk of the scroll in the middle and you see the rubber band across the top which was the closure mechanism to hold the case together you look at the inside of the scroll and what you can see is the first ever look at the tortured internal structure of a Herculaneum scroll but one that hasn't yet been completely dismantled by well-meaning people pouring mercury or using gas or from Kentucky we might say a bowie knife for lack of a better term to be able to open so we were able actually to do this work completely non invasively and while we struggled at being able to read the writing this was a huge contribution and step forward because although our examples as in the lower-right were simplified compared to the true structure of Herculaneum the approach was something that was becoming a possibility a dream for me and a a real ability for the community so here is some data from that early experiment to show you the idea of the scan and the data that it produced to be able to see every layer from tomography all the way through the structure of the scroll and then to be able to unwrap a section of that virtually without any need to open the object physically and then you can see on the result here the striations of the actual papyrus intact from the internal part of the scroll no writing visible although if you stare at it long enough you might vince yourself that you are seeing writing and i'll speak to that in a minute so this is what we were faced with in 2009 internal structure never-before-seen promise of the possibility of virtual unwrapping and the development of a technical approach which I began to call an engine for discovery made up of a series of software approaches that at the beginning would be based on something like tomography and at the end would allow scholarship if you want to consider that to be transparent basically a new way to take a picture and the ability then to read what what came out I want to give you some intuition though into this because tomography is difficult to understand if you haven't seen it before so let me play for you a short video to give you some intuition [Music] using the red dough the Baker can create a pasta on the white dough but the bigger goal is obviously no longer visible this is where everything crashes I'm not sure where the where the audio went but we take the slices put them together and you see the image on the right and that image comes from those slices photographed and on which is just like tomography that's not ever possible that physical unwrapping but the virtual as possible and gives a reading does that give you kind of an intuition that is the Jelly Roll model yeah all right well while we struggled with Herculaneum and we have struggled mightily it's it's one of the most difficult problems we've ever faced what came along was another scroll ready to go and this scroll from the Dead Sea on the western shore from an Getty was ready-made for us to try virtual unwrapping and in fact it succeeded and some of you may have seen this work the scroll Fuhrman Getty was virtually unwrapped in 2015 and appeared in publication in 2016 and I want to show you another video that looks exactly like the one I just showed except with a real scroll the scroll from an Getty virtual unwrapping begins by acquiring a three-dimensional volumetric scan of the damaged manuscript this scan produces a set of cross-sectional images that show the internal structure of the scroll when viewed as a 3d object one can clearly see the individual layers of the scroll but any text on the surface of those layers is obscured from view in order for a readable version of the scroll to be produced these images must be passed through our virtual unwrapping pipeline first we capture the 3d shape of the layers of the scroll in a process called segmentation on the left side of the screen the software moves through the scroll image by image tracing the shape of a single scroll wrap on the right we see the 3d model that this produces next we extract the ink from the data in a process called texturing using the 3d shape generated by segmentation our software makes another pass through the scroll this time looking for very bright pixels bright pixels indicate regions of dense material in this case inks made with iron or lead we now have a single wrap of the scroll with the text shown clearly on its surface however because the surface is curved it's difficult to read all of the text from one viewpoint the flattening stage of our pipeline converts this textured 3d surface into a flat plane so that the text can be more easily read to produce the best results these three steps must be performed on one small section of the scroll at a time as a result we end up with several texture images that must be merged together this merging process creates a single consolidated image that shows the full text using this pipeline we have restored and revealed the text of five complete wraps of the N Getty scroll the two distinct columns of Hebrew writing reveal the scroll to be the Book of Leviticus this marks the end add a scroll as the earliest copy of a pentateuchal book ever found in a Holy Ark a significant discovery in Biblical Archaeology thanks to my daughter who did the voiceover my daughter Julia lives here in LA and it's wonderful that I'm here to be able to see her a little bit more and I will I want to tell you this sometimes you know you catch a break what we the break that we caught here with the UH Nettie scroll was at number one the ink didn't require any further processing from the tomography to be able to see it and number two the raps were not so tight so we didn't have to solve a really difficult problem of finding all those raps everything else in the pipeline worked and we were able to go from acquisition through all the stages to scholarship we actually published a paper from scholars who did biblical scholarship on that text the local scholarship on that text from the internal part of this scroll never having opened it so now what I want to show you are some problems with Herculaneum and I'm gonna tell you how we're gonna solve them these are not real letters and I'm not going to ask our papper ologist to tell me which Greek letters or Latin letters these are because they're not real these are examples that I've snipped from my own data from Herculaneum to show that it's possible to see letter forms even though they're not examples of real letter forms we have to include when we talk about virtual unwrapping a metadata pipeline from the original data to the final claim and if we don't make that pipeline available for peer review then it's possible for people to imagine that they're seeing writing inside something as difficult and complicated as an x-ray and then make claims about that virtual unwrapping when it works properly and when those metadata chains are set up leaves no doubt that the text is the text on the top you see an unwrapped section of a medieval manuscript that we scanned in shout and on the bottom you see part of the part of the young Getty scroll and let me show you what the data from the sharp manuscripts looks like and when you see the data this is the Micro computed tomography as a volume as you see the data you tell me if you can't tell that there's writing visible okay now I'm going to turn this volume a little bit of enhancement into a transparent volume and what you should see is word soup you see all the three dimensions and all the layers but I've enhanced just the letters that are floating in this volume they actually are positioned on real material but we haven't done the process yet of all of the unwrapping but would you doubt that the data is there no you would not all we need is the metadata chain to be able to confirm that any claims that come from this can be confirmed by external peer-reviewed sources all right so now I moved to today on our short timeline what about Herculaneum why haven't we been able to read it why am I not presenting a completely unwrapped Herculaneum scroll today we've been frustrated by Herculaneum Inc I as a computer scientists have been frustrated by Herculaneum Inc you've heard of the frustrations from the papper ologists I went back to the lab and I took carbon ink and I made some experiments because I'd been told that you're never going to see carbon in computed tomography that just didn't feel right to me but that's what the conventional wisdom has been so I put a bunch of carbon on index cards and then I scanned it and guess what you can see carbon just fine in computed tomography because things aren't invisible all right they just might not be visible yet to the human eye what you see here is an edge-on view of the index card with a big glop of carbon sitting there and at the right resolution I could see that because it's not all flat there's a bump bump must be the carbon here's what we've discovered about seeing carbon ink in computed tomography which side do you think the papyrus is which side do you think the ink is can you tell that there's a difference between the two yeah you can the ink has this black cracked look with features that show you that it's probably inked on top of something the papyrus has this different look that shows you a texture that's different this is from scanning electron microscope why can't we pull these features out of tomography and use them to be able to see the ink well it turns out that you can if you have a high enough resolution so at a very high resolution can you see where the ink goes through the middle of the circle and the papyrus is on the top and the ink is on the bottom I'm going to blur it a little bit gets a little harder right get a blur it a little bit more almost impossible the resolution it turns out really matters if you scan things at too low a resolution you can't see what you want so now I want to show you an experiment that we did in the lab to riff on this idea of resolution matters the carbon phantom is something we created out of pure carbon ink we made a bunch of symbols and we numbered the columns 1 to 6 where one is only one layer of carbon and six is six applications of carbon and the dots are made out of iron golf so that we can see them in the x-ray very easily we knew that we would not see the carbon very well then we used a machine learning technique to say you know what I know where the ink ought to be because I made this target I'm gonna train up the system to recognize where the ink is and calculate a way to predict where it might find ink and we're going to see if we can make that work in other words we think that the evidence of the carbon is there just not visible to the naked eye and that we can tease it out so here's the original picture as a reference and here's what we get when we scan that phantom in computed tomography on the right hand side which is the column 6 you see faintly extra density where there carbon is really thick because then it's visible to the naked eye but at 5 applications working from right to left you see less evidence less evidence down to columns 1 & 2 where you can see nothing now we've trained a network we've trained a machine learning system to be able to amplify that ink and here is what we get when we do the amplification what we get is the ability to detect almost down to the single layer application of carbon the presence of the ink now this amplification is happening because we've created a reference library that shows where the ink is and where the ink is not and then we learn the subtlety of that the tomography and then from the tomography alone we were able to amplify the evidence of the ink even though we can't see it with the naked eye an additional benefit is that we can render the same thing into something that looks photorealistic so this is not a photo this is rendered from tomography alone but because we have a reference library that helps us make it photorealistic we can create something that looks almost like we had taken a photo of it but only from the tomography does that make sense so here's the triptych of the four things to compare the photo on top the tomography that we can acquire as the second row the machine learning amplification as the third row and then the photorealistic rendering from tomography alone on the fourth what we realized in doing this work is that we think that we've developed a recipe that will allow us to see Herculaneum ink in tomography and then do virtual unwrapping the recipe includes this notion of artificial intelligence or machine learning using a convolutional neural network and I don't think this is probably the forum to go more deeply into that but let me say the recipe is a numbers game it's about resolution if you scan something at 12 microns you're gonna have twenty-one hundred pixels per inch to play with and if you scan it at five microns you're gonna have five thousand pixels per inch to play with okay so that numbers game edge-on gives you maybe 17 pixels through the thickness of the layer of papyrus to play with if the ink is only on one side and part of that you might have two or three pixels at 12 microns but if you go down to five you might have six or seven pixels that you can play with that are gonna show ink and it's not unlike what NASA does when they run the Hubble telescope so if you look up at the sky and you see the stars they're beautiful the moon with your naked eye you're going to be able to appreciate those but at the very lower part of this diagram you see a very small section of sky that the Hubble scans at super high resolution and when it does that it finds that in that really small section of the guy you can see untold galaxies now imagine if you could do that across the entire night sky you'd have a catalogue of the entire thing what we're essentially trying to do is to create a telescope looking into the Herculaneum scroll at the resolution we need to be able to see the carbon on the ink and then do virtual unwrapping okay let me go through an example and then we'll get to tomorrow example we did last year involved this fragment and you can see it circled in in in in blow-up this fragment gave us the chance on a single authentic piece to test our theory that machine learning could help us amplify this ink from tomography so on the left you see the photograph and on the right you see what we actually got when we did the tomography of that single piece now what's really hard here is that we have to have a reference library we have to have examples of ink to do the training so what we did here is a nine-fold experiment we divided the area of the ink into nine regions we would leave one out and trained on eight and then use that network to classify the one we left out and then we repeated that nine times the result of that experiment gave us this side-by-side the original photo and the tomography with no visible ink in the tomography and then the machine learning showing us that there's evidence of the ink and then an amplification that actually worked one single letter form you know why we did this experiment with one letter form because we couldn't get our hands on any other letter forms somehow it was possible to pour mercury on scrolls and it was possible to cut them with a knife but it wasn't possible for us to do x-ray scans until recently and thanks to the Getty and this exhibit we've had a breakthrough in our ability to do work because we've been able to collect data that we've never had before and I'm going to show you some of that data from the very scrolls that are in this exhibit we hoped with Ken Levitan and the Getty to build some of the cases that were necessary for transport and ultimately for display but in a self-interested way those cases were all so helpful for us to be able to collect data when you do the micro computed tomography of a scroll and the conservation is paramount it has to be mounted in such a way so that no damage is done and so this photograph photograph attic method allowed us to create custom fitting cases that were used for the transport of the scrolls and also for the scanning of the scrolls and here you see two conservators from the library in Naples for Ezio and Luigi and they are working with our cases to help us acquire data and we did this in partnership with UCLA College of Dentistry we thank them for allowing us to use their facility to collect this data over the course of about a week just prior to the opening of this exhibit we were able to collect Micro computed tomography on to two of the of the three scrolls that you see in the exhibit here and I want to show you that data so no one has ever seen this outside our lab so I saved it for this audience and I thank you for coming you are now seeing the internal structure of the scrolls that upstairs you can only see the external structure of and that's thanks to Micro computed tomography as you look at this you might think well that's pretty daunting I don't know if anybody's ever gonna read anything inside of that I think that pretty much every day that I better look at this data if you take a look at one slice and I blow it up you'll see this structure and the need for resolution because those layers are packed pretty closely together and it makes the problem extremely difficult another view of the scroll in its case and this one I'm going to show you axially and also from the side so that you can get a sense of the incredible geometry from the forces that occurred when this thing was carbonized so the axial view you can see evidence still the umbilical the very bright spot in the center is the evidence from the wood peg that the scroll was wound on and then when I tip this back up and I show you the side view you'll see that the scroll was also crushed in this direction and you'll see the wrinkles in that direction both of those things make it a terrible candidate for Euler on rapping it's probably why this one lasted in the state because they already realized from the beginning it was hopeless by looking at the outside you know when I see these data I realized that um the folks who did the unwrapping were doomed from the beginning because most of the layers were already broken before they ever started the ability to do the restoration here you have fragment 245 again with a a view that shows the ink a little bit more clearly but now I'm going to show you the computed tomography that we have the ink being visible makes this a perfect candidate for a reference library that could train the machine learning approach to be able to recognize the ink on papyrus in a closed scroll so in an ironic twist the fragments that have been open showing visible text we think have become the key to unlock the ability to see the ones that are still closed because it allows us to build a reference library which if we add to the engine for discovery just becomes another twist in the engineering story about how to solve this problem but ultimately gets collapsed into yet another sophisticated camera which we can then use to actually provide a reading which is my goal so in conclusion I would like you to help me see if we can see a letter form coming purely from tomography carbon ink from Herculaneum and I hope that we can get an up-or-down vote on whether we're on the right track so I'm going to show you the data first this is the tomography this is a small fragment about the size of the palm of your hand and the data is at about 3 to 4 micron resolution which is very high resolution okay now you've seen everything you need to know the surface this is might be what you would see if you were able to look at this under a microscope except there's no visible ink because it comes from tomography why did we scan an open fragment it's because we know the right answer so we have our scientific control it's high-resolution if I took just this area and I blew it up I can see incredible detail but no evidence of writing all right so what we did is we trained our neural network to do machine learning on the left hand side and then we pretended like we'd never seen the right hand side and we classified so the right hand sides not been seen by the method we've only trained on the ink that's visible on the left I'm not going to tell you what letter form is visible but I'm going to give you the scale because the scale is actually really important that's about the size of the letter form that you're going to be looking for on the right hand side of this example and I'm gonna play you a little video that is the training starting with no training train train train train and then near the end of that sequence you should see the letters appear that is the machine learning learning the signature of the carbon ink are you ready tapper ologists are you ready I'm looking for one Greek letter on the right hand side about the size of that Delta okay at massive resolution it sometimes it's better to see it in thumbnail okay does anybody have a guess as to what the letter is it is omega you are all pathologist we are all pathology all right so what we've shown is that you can see carbon ink and tomography you can see the ink of Herculaneum and we can do virtual unwrapping so I think Omega is the right place to end thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Getty Museum

Views: 87,711

Keywords: getty museum, getty, getty villa, Herculaneum, Mt. Vesuvius, Mount Vesuvius, Papyrus scrolls, Papyri scrolls, Ancient papyri, Carbonized, Carbonised, Villa dei Papyri, Villa of the Papyri, Herculaneum papyri, Read papyri, Getty Villa, J. Paul Getty Museum, Ancient art, Ancient objects, Roman art, Roman objects, Classical texts

Id: g-7-Xg75CCI

Length: 113min 33sec (6813 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 25 2019