Beautiful Truths from the Ashes

A Second Renaissance may be hidden in the Herculaneum Scrolls

“Oh, to be alive in such an age, when miracles are everywhere, and every inch of common air throbs a tremendous prophecy, of greater marvels yet to be.”  Walt Whitman

THE NEXT RENAISSANCE?

Exactly 1,944 years ago today, on 17 October 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius erupted, sending a plume of super-hot gases, pulverized rock and ash twenty miles into the sky and killing everyone living in nearby Pompeii.  The elite community of Herculaneum was on the other side of the prevailing breeze, and its residents were mostly able to escape with their lives while inches of hot ashes began floating down onto their town. 

Last week, the long term consequences of the ancient eruption of Mount Vesuvius were revealed:  on October 12^th, 2023 at about four o’clock in the afternoon on the East Coast of the United States, a new understanding of being human became possible. That’s when it was announced that the first word had been deciphered from an unopened scroll buried under twenty meters of ash and mud in Herculaneum following the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

Herculaneum Scroll
Carbonized Exactly 1,944 Years Ago

Courtesy:  University of Kentucky

The scroll is one of six hundred scrolls found in the library of the equivalent of a Roman billionaire in a villa built by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar and the size of a small modern liberal arts college.  The last time classical discoveries of this scale were made they triggered the European Renaissance. 

Digital Reconstruction of the Herculaneum Villa

Courtesy:  Scrollprize.org

You may already know that only a tiny fraction of the greatest texts from Greek and Latin antiquity survived.  Estimates range from a survival rate of 1% to 3 – 5%, but in any case, what we know about the Classical Period is based upon a tiny fraction of what the greatest Greek and Roman authors actually wrote.

There are numerous examples, like Aristotle’s treatise on comedy, that we know about but have no idea what they may have contained.  And then there is the vast unknown continent of classic texts we don’t even know about.  Imagine having most of the text of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”—and nothing else in Shakespeare’s First Folio.  If the text of “Hamlet” had simply disappeared, a loss of that magnitude would have literally altered the course of European culture.

The 1 – 5% of Classical works that do we have amounts to the equivalent of three hundred scrolls, which means that the ability to digitally “un-roll” and read the carbonized Herculaneum scrolls potentially doubles the number of Greek and Latin works now available to humanity.  I feel like Walt Whitman did in the quote at the top of this essay, I’m thrilled and grateful “to be alive in such an age, when miracles are everywhere, and every inch of common air throbs a tremendous prophecy, of greater marvels yet to be.” 

The Renaissance completely changed the European understanding of what it means to be human.  As a result, the course of European history developed a higher trajectory.  The ancient ideas of the Greeks and Romans were assimilated and empowered inquiring and individualist Europeans to re-invent science, create their own national literatures, evolve art and architecture to new heights of beauty, and set out and explore, and ultimately conquer, the rest of the world. 

Who knows yet what the consequences will be of the discoveries made possible by last week’s scientific breakthrough?

AN ANCIENT CATASTROPHE

Herculaneum was a town nestled on the Mediterranean coast to the west of Mount Vesuvius.  It was a wealthy enclave for the Roman elite compared to the larger and more famous city of Pompeii, rather like Martha’s Vineyard today compared to Providence, Rhode Island.  The eruption of Mount Vesuvius killed everybody living in Pompeii under super-heated gas and rock fragments, collapsing roofs and incinerating anything not made of stone or metal at temperatures of 480 degrees Fahrenheit.  The conflagration was hotter than Fahrenheit 451, which Ray Bradbury made famous as the temperature at which books spontaneously combust in his own book of that title.

Herculaneum had a different fate.  The winds initially blew the enormous annihilating cloud, described by survivors as a “stone pine tree” and probably resembling the modern “mushroom cloud” caused by a thermonuclear explosion, in the opposite direction from Herculaneum.  As a result, residents were mostly able to escape as falling ash began settling around them.  By the next day, the abandoned town was covered in twenty yards of mud and ash which preserved many possessions of the wealthy inhabitants that would have been utterly incinerated in Pompeii.  Although carbonized, the parchment scrolls in the billionaire’s library retained their original shape, and structure.  Most importantly, the texts inscribed on them were preserved, as a 21-year-old computer science student proved last week.

A TRIUMPH OF PHYSICS AND AI

Two of the latest forms of technology made the discovery possible:  particle physics and AI.  Four years ago, Professor Brent Seales of the University of Kentucky first used a particle accelerator to image scrolls from Herculaneum. Using a process called computer tomography, Professor Searles and his team were able to achieve 3D resolutions of 4 µm, or 4 millionths of a meter.

Three-dimensional resolution is essential because the ink used in the Herculaneum scrolls is made of carbon and wasn’t visible to the human eye on the carbonized parchment.  But the carbon ink left a slight raised area where it traced over the parchment, which is detectable when viewed in 3D at 4 µm.  The cross section of a section of the rolled scroll is shown below in Prof. Seales’ presentation:

Courtesy:  University of Kentucky

When the scroll is digitally flattened and viewed from above, the inked area looks like a shiny plateau next to the fibers of the surrounding parchment, like a paved parking lot on a grassy meadow. In the image below, the border of the ink in the bottom half of the image is clearly discernible against the parchment in the top half of the image:

Courtesy:  University of Kentucky

This “crackle pattern” was discovered by Casey Handmer and was a key break-through, because it meant that there were objective traces of the carbonized ink, detectable in three dimensions, that could, in principle, be deciphered by sufficiently sensitive and sophisticated pattern-recognition software. 

The next step was to train an image scanner using AI to recognize the light areas in the digital images of the scrolls.  Professor Seales and his team began using a convolutional neural network and started training it to recognize the faint 3D plateaus representing inked letters from the vast surrounding “steppes” of parchment grasslands—an excruciatingly slow, pain-staking process.

Courtesy:  University of Kentucky

At this point, the convergence of particle physics and AI was combined with yet another modern advance:   venture capital.  Two VCs, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, offered a prize to the first person able to decipher a single word.  The prize was claimed almost simultaneously by Luke Farritor, a computer science college student and SpaceX summer intern, and Youssef Nader, an Egyptian bio-robotics student studying in Berlin.  They both focused on the same section of the scroll and were both able to decipher the word ΠΟΡΦΥΡΑϹ (porphyras) meaning a purple dye. The colored areas in the image below surround individual Greek letters.  Green areas indicate over 80% confidence, the yellow areas indicate 50 – 80% confidence, and the red areas indicate less than 50% confidence.

Nader’s image is even clearer and shows two other words ανυοντα (“achieving”) and ομοιων (“similar”) that confirm the scroll is a previously unknown text:

In summary, the ability to begin reading a library that was carbonized on this day 1,944 years ago represents the triumphant convergence of the latest 21^st century technology and financial innovation combined with human creativity and ingenuity.

Who cares?

ANCIENT TEXTS ARE THE SOURCE OF CURRENT TRUTHS

You may or may not remember the 1980s best-selling novel The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, which was also made into a movie starring Sean Connery.  The core of the plot is to find out who is responsible for murdering a series of monks in a monastery, and why the killer is committing the crimes (spoiler alert coming up).  The solution is that the only copy of Aristotle’s lost treatise on comedy is possessed by the monastery, and the killer will do anything to possess it.  Since the foundational text for European theater is Aristotle’s treatise on tragedy, you can imagine how incredible it would be to possess Aristotle’s work on comedy.  It might inspire a new generation of über-Seinfelds and Dave Chappelles. 

Ho hum, you say?

You may be aware of the fact that George Lucas was able to turn a failed movie script into the blockbusting Star Wars series when somebody recommended he read The Hero with a Thousand Faces by the scholar Joseph Campbell. Campbell’s book distills thousands of myths and ancient stories into a Hero’s Journey, the key elements of which include the call to adventure, the initiation of the hero, the struggle for a great prize and ultimately for the life or death of the hero, encounters with magicians and sages, beautiful women who are both good and evil, and ultimately the winning of a great prize which is a blessing to the hero’s community, to which he returns in triumph.

George Lucas publicly described the influence of The Hero with a Thousand Faces on his own creative process:

“The Western was possibly the last generically American fairy tale, telling us about our values. And once the Western disappeared, nothing has ever taken its place. In literature we were going off into science fiction...so that's when I started doing more strenuous research   . . . and I started reading Joe's books . . . . It was very eerie because in reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces I began to realize that my first draft of Star Wars was following classic motifs...so I modified my next draft according to what I'd been learning about classical motifs.”

Lucas’s breakout film was American Graffiti, a wonderful movie but not a game-changing cultural phenomenon like Stars Wars.  We’d all agree that the multi-decade Stars Wars franchise has deeply influenced global popular culture.  Joseph Campbell and his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces are the link between modern popular culture and the ancient texts of India and Asia Minor.

Campbell was the student of an academic genius named Heinrich Zimmer.  Zimmer was part of the movement in the late 19^th century and early 20^th century to translate and start to interpret the greatest ancient texts of South and East Asia.  Zimmer focused on India and Mesopotamia, and the German scholar Richard Wilhelm focused on translating the great Chinese Daoist masterpiece the I Ching. 

The work of great scholars like Zimmer and Wilhelm made the timeless classics of world civilization available to the West for the first time—ever.  This knowledge, diffused by figures such as D.T. Suzuki and Allan Watts, helped inspire Jack Keroauc, Allen Ginsburg and the Beat Generation in the 1950s, and were important influences on the Hippie / New Age movements in the 1960s and 1970s. Personally, I prefer Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums to On the Road, and I prefer J.D. Salinger’s East Asian and Orthodox Christian-inspired Franny and Zooey to The Catcher in the Rye—but I used to like my vodka and whiskey straight, too.

Zimmer fled the Nazis and was teaching at Columbia University in New York when he died suddenly of pneumonia in 1943.  The Hero with a Thousand Faces is essentially Campbell’s notes of what he had learned from Zimmer. 

In 2023, 46 years after the release of Star Wars, the entire motion picture industry is geared up to tell stories based on The Hero with a Thousand Faces.  Whether you and your kids were watching a Disney movie, the latest cartoon comic sequel, or the umpteenth prequel or sequel in the Stars Wars franchise, the narrative skeleton of the action passing before your eyes is The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

The foundation of modern popular culture is the most ancient religious and philosophical texts ever written.  That’s highly ironic in an age of supposedly evidence-based, data-driven empirical decision-making.

THE REVERSE REVELATION OF ANCIENT IDEAS

Something else that’s essential to understand in order to grasp the significance of last week’s announcement:  the West has been discovering the treasures of world civilization in reverse order, with the oldest texts being discovered last.  It’s like a scroll opened and read from the wrong end.

It may not be apparent to you why that makes any difference—but it depends on how you feel about what happened during the 20^th Century.  What we call World Wars I and II were, from the German perspective, the second Thirty Year’s War (1914 - 1945).  The first Thirty Year’s War (1618 – 1648) left much of Germany a smoking ruin littered with German corpses, after the great European powers had used Germany as their battleground for decades.  During this period large areas of Germany lost between 1/3 and 2/3s of their population to murder, famine and disease.

THE FATEFUL GERMAN ENCOUNTER WITH CLASSICAL GREECE

In between the two Thirty Year’s Wars the Germans were introduced to Classical Greek civilization, thanks to the founder of art history, Johann Winckelmann. In 1755 Winckelmann published his ground-breaking book Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks.  The Germans had never been conquered by the Romans, and they were largely unaffected by the Renaissance, so Germany never really assimilated Classical Latin civilization before encountering the Classical Greeks.  It’s impossible to over-state the extent to which the distant glamour of Classical Greece enthralled and inspired the Germans. The two most important influences on Germany (and the 20^th century) were Greek philosophy and the Homeric hero.

Greek philosophy taught atheism.  Socrates was sentenced to die by the Athenian court for corrupting the youth of Athens, and that wasn’t because of his many sexual encounters with the teenagers and young men to whom he taught philosophy.  Socrates was sentenced to death because, the court determined, Socrates taught his young philosophy students to despise the Gods of Athens. 

Atheism was a welcome message in 18^th century Germany, which had been ground zero for the Reformation and then the principal battleground, along with the Netherlands and the duels on the high seas between the navies of England and Spain, for the bloody wars of the Counter-Reformation.  Many Germans were thoroughly fed up with being tortured and murdered for the sake of some brand of Christianity.

German philosophy is world famous, but it’s not generally understood that its rise signals the Germans were casting off the constraints of Christianity earlier than other European nations. There were still plenty of devoutly Christian Germans during Johann Winckelmann’s lifetime, but the fact that the religious genius Johann Sebastian Bach died in 1750—and his music disappeared and was promptly forgotten for over a century—is the sign a new Germany was rising from the ashes of the first Thirty Year’s War.

THE HOMERIC HERO, THE WEHRMACHT, AND HAMAS

To this day, the German name for “high school” is Gymnasium, named in honour of the institution in which Classical Greek youths were educated.  Until 1945, German military doctrine was Vernichtungskrieg—Annihilation Warfare (and the Germans mean it when they say “annihilation”).  “Annihilation Warfare” is a handy meme for the Classical Greek doctrine of warfare as depicted in Homer and Thucydides, which generations of highly educated and intelligent Germans avidly studied and adapted to the latest German technology.

Those of us who still profess civilized values were shocked last week by the barbaric crimes committed by Hamas warriors against Israelis who fell into their clutches:  entire villages were burned to the ground, often with their inhabitants still alive inside the buildings, old women and children were pitilessly murdered, young women were beaten, tortured and raped next to the dead bodies of their loved ones, and hundreds of people were taken captive and carried away as hostages in the Hamas stronghold of Gaza.

Those are exactly the kinds of events described by Homer in his magnificent epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey.  It’s the actual plot—and Homer celebrates those warriors and surrounds them with enticing glamour.  The truth is that the behaviour of the Homeric hero is essentially indistinguishable from the cruel and sadistic actions of the Hamas raiders last week.  It’s also no coincidence that the Hamas rampage is repeatedly described as the worst atrocities inflicted on Jews since the Holocaust, because the Germans avidly read Homer in the original, and absorbed Homeric values as a national standard.

The question for us, 1,944 years to the day after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, is are we ready as a global civilization for what might be in the Herculaneum scrolls?  Can we handle what we’re about to learn from the greatest geniuses of the Classical era?

WHAT’S IN THE HERCULANEUM SCROLLS?

It’s possible that the Classical thought preserved in the Herculaneum scrolls could be uniquely relevant to our lives in the 2020s.  The Letters of the Apostle Paul were circulating widely around the Roman Empire and all three Gospels except the Gospel of John had been written.  Peter had been beheaded in Rome a generation before, and Nero’s persecutions of the Christians had come and gone.  There may be previously lost scrolls that attempt to refute Christianity—they’re unlikely to have survived the Christian Roman Empire after Constantine, or to have been preserved in the monasteries of medieval Europe.   

The Destruction of Jerusalem happened nine years before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and by some estimates the Jewish people constituted almost 10% of the population of the Roman Empire.  Could there be scrolls that cast new light on pre- and post-Diaspora Judaism in the Classical period?

If today we are living through the twilight of the American Republic and the transition to Imperial America, what might it mean to read a vast library of contemporary Roman history, politics and private letters three generations after the loss of the Roman Republic?

What will it be like to have transparency into the vast scale and scope of Classical thought—to encounter, for the first time, the Greek and Roman equivalents of our greatest playwrights, novelists, poets, philosophers and historians of the last several centuries, in all their complete grandeur?

Who knows?

Of course, if the owner of the villa in 79 AD was a rich vulgarian like Trimalchio, the host in Petronius’ Satyricon, he would be closer in spirit to our modern billionaires Gates, Bezos and Zuckerberg than to the great plutocrat collectors of history like J.P. Morgan and the Medicis.  In which case, we might find very little elevated thought in those scrolls and lots of lists of yachts, jars of oil, vaults filled with gold, and storehouses of grain.

If a Trimalch Zuckerberg owned the villa in 79 AD, no thrilling and risky intellectual awaits our civilization in those blackened scrolls. 

CONCLUSION

But I’d like to think not.  I’d like to think that we are ready for the truth and the truth is ready for us. I’d like to think we can handle the truth, whatever it may be.  And I’d like to think that the truth we find will enrich and nurture our next stage of evolution as human beings.

I’m so grateful to be alive right now!

Acknowledgements:

My thanks to my son Alex for sending me the good news about the discovery of the word porphyras, to my friend Rex Dupain for inspiring me to write about this subject, and to CansaFis Foote, Leo Hepsis and Nicole Lee for their extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts.