Isegoria

Scholars are in search of Western civilisation’s lost classics, trapped under lava from Vesuvius:

The unique library of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, buried beneath lava by Vesuvius’s eruption in AD79, is slowly revealing its long-held secrets

Stored in a sky-lit reading room on the top floor of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples are the charred remains of the only library to survive from classical antiquity. The ancient world’s other great book collections — at Athens, Alexandria and Rome — all perished in the chaos of the centuries. But the library of the Villa of the Papyri was conserved, paradoxically, by an act of destruction.

Lying to the northwest of ancient Herculaneum, this sumptuous seaside mansion was buried beneath 30m of petrified volcanic mud during the catastrophic eruption of Mt Vesuvius on August 24, AD79. Antiquities hunters in the mid-18th century sunk shafts and dug tunnels around Herculaneum and found the villa, surfacing with a magnificent booty of bronzes and marbles. Most of these, including a svelte seated Hermes modelled in the manner of Lyssipus, now grace the National Archeological Museum in Naples.

The excavators also found what they took to be chunks of coal deep inside the villa, and set them alight to illuminate their passage underground. Only when they noticed how many torches had solidified around an umbilicus — a core of wood or bone to which the roll was attached — did the true nature of the find become apparent. Here was a trove of ancient texts, carbonised by the heat surge of the eruption. About 1800 were eventually retrieved.

A cluster of the villa’s papyrus scrolls, in much the same state as they were found 250 years ago, lies in a display case in the Biblioteca Nazionale’s Herculaneum reading room. The individual scrolls, which extend in some cases to 9m unrolled, look not unlike charcoaled arboreal limbs left at the bottom of a campfire. A group of six rolls, compacted by the weight of volcanic debris, has emulsified into one unsightly pile.

In a corner of the room stands a device invented in 1756 by the abbot Antonio Piaggio, a conservator of ancient manuscripts in the Vatican Library, to unroll the papyri by suspending them from silk threads attached to their surface with a paste of fish oil. These were fixed in place by a slice of pig’s bladder. Piaggio’s machine, though painstakingly slow, was used successfully until the beginning of the 20th century. The room also contains a 3m length of scroll unrolled by Piaggio’s machine, with 40 columns of Greek text in a rhythmic procession.

Scholars today, using multi-spectral imaging technology, are able to decipher the otherwise inscrutable surface of black ink on black fabric of the papyrus scrolls. A multinational team has assembled to transcribe the collection. But work has stalled as they await refinement of a new technique, an application of the CT scan, which will allow some of the untouched texts to be deciphered without exposing them to the risk of further damage.

Jerome Groopman writes about superbugs — like MRSA — in the New Yorker:

Unlike resistant forms of Klebsiella and other gram-negative bacteria, however, MRSA can be treated. “There are about a dozen new antibiotics coming on the market in the next couple of years,” Moellering noted. “But there are no good drugs coming along for these gram-negatives.” Klebsiella and similarly classified bacteria, including Acinetobacter, Enterobacter, and Pseudomonas, have an extra cellular envelope that MRSA lacks, and that hampers the entry of large molecules like antibiotic drugs. “The Klebsiella that caused particular trouble in New York are spreading out,” Moellering told me. “They have very high mortality rates. They are sort of the doomsday-scenario bugs.”

(Hat tip to FuturePundit.)

Early Europeans quickly got a taste for milk — or, rather, early near-easterners got a taste for milk even earlier than previously realized:

Traces of milk found in 9000-year-old ceramic pot fragments have pushed back the earliest known consumption of animal milk by people by a millennium.

Cattle, sheep and goats were domesticated in the Near East about 10,000 years ago, but many archaeologists believe people used only their meat and hides at first, with secondary uses such as wool, power and milk coming much later.

Richard Evershed at the University of Bristol, UK, and his colleagues collected 2225 pottery fragments from the Near East, dating from the seventh to fifth millennia BC. By measuring carbon isotope ratios in organic residues on the shards, they found that many – especially very old ones from north-west Anatolia, now Turkey — had contained milk (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature07180).

Other studies indicate that the people of the era lacked the enzymes to digest animal milk in its fresh form, but if it had been stored in the form of cheese or butter they would have been able to consume it, the authors say.

Bacteria were the real killers in 1918 flu pandemic, which is good news, in a sense, because we now have antibiotics — and they still work:

The more they investigated, the more bacteria emerged as the true killers, an idea now supported by most influenza experts.

For instance, had a super virus been responsible for most deaths, one might expect people to die fairly rapidly, or at least for most cases to follow a similar progression. However, Shanks and Brundage found that few people died within three days of showing symptoms, while most people lasted more than a week, some survived two — all hallmarks of pneumonia.

Military health records for barracks and battleships also painted a different picture. New recruits — men unlikely to have been exposed to resident bacteria — died in droves, while soldiers whose immune systems were accustomed to the local bugs survived.

And most compelling, Brundage says, medical experts of the day identified pneumonia as the cause of most deaths.

(Hat tip to FuturePundit.)