Lost Scrolls of Pompeii: New Revelation, review: a misleading title − but a fascinating subject
A couple of years ago, Channel 5’s very smart controller Ben Frow explained that some history topics are catnip to his audience. “They like Rome, they like Egypt, they like Pompeii. Elizabethans, Victorians, Tudors.” And so we find Alice Roberts presenting a show named The Lost Scrolls of Pompeii: New Revelation, despite it not being about Pompeii at all.
In fact, the scrolls of the title were found in Herculaneum, which lies a few miles along the Italian coast and was also hit by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD. What has been unearthed at Herculaneum “is far better preserved than at its more famous neighbour”, Roberts explained. But Pompeii is the name that gets bums on seats, so she’s lumbered with it.
The “lost” scrolls were also found several hundred years ago, but let’s not split hairs. This documentary was about discovering what lies inside them, and it was genuinely interesting. These some 1,800 papyrus scrolls represent the only surviving library from the ancient world, Roberts said. But they were carbonised in the eruption and now resemble lumps of charcoal. Attempts to unroll them have resulted in them crumbling to dust.
Enter Brent Seales from the University of Kentucky, who has devoted the past 20 years to unlocking the scrolls’ contents. He’s not an archaeologist or a historian, but a computer scientist, and has come at this problem from a different angle. “I want to be able to read what’s inside a Herculaneum scroll without having to open it,” he said.
So via a combination of high-intensity X-rays (carried out by a company in Oxfordshire) and an AI programme of Seales’s devising, he was able to “see” inside the rolled-up scrolls. Roberts, a multi-purpose TV presenter whose background is in science but who has presented on everything from wild swimming to the Egyptian rail network, dreamed of discovering an unknown work by Aristotle.
But the project is still in its early stages, and the discovery so far of one complete word was something of a let-down as a viewing experience. That word is “porphyras” – Ancient Greek for “purple”.
