The Pharaoh’s Treasure

I’ve passed through Pompeii on several occasions, and in every case found myself looking over my shoulder, wondering what or who might be following me or lurking in the ruins. If there is any place on earth where ghosts roam unfettered, it must be there. Ever since the eruption of Vesuvius in the summer of 79 A.D., it has been a quiet, almost eerie place, like a large cemetery in which the dead are only partially interred. The scariest part is the Garden of Fugitives with its plaster casts on view of people frozen in death throes. Who could ever forget the expressions on the faces of these vaporized bodies, or the remains of food left on the table on that fateful day?

Prior to the eruption, it was a prosperous, thriving resort town with luxurious villas positioned to take advantage of the natural beauty of the place. The Bay of Naples close by is unrivalled in its scenery and sunsets, the warm waters of the hot spas fed by volcanic hot springs brought droves of wealthy Roman tourists to the local art galleries. The construction business blossomed as vacation houses sprouted and nearby towns grew. Julius Caesar, Augustus, Cicero, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero all had summer places on the bay.¹

In the seaside town of Herculaneum, which lies between Pompeii and Naples, the residents heard a tremendous explosion late one afternoon. With that warning, they made their way down to the boats in the harbor; thus, when the town was excavated hundreds of years later, few corpses were found in the houses or streets of Herculaneum, unlike the bodies strewn about in Pompeii where people had been caught in the streets. Sadly, however, in Herculaneum many were found trapped on the beach. When the boats left the docks, hundreds were left behind. People who were too late, too poor, or too weak were huddled in the ancient boathouses where their corpses were uncovered in 1981.

Following the eruption, the town was then engulfed in pyroclastic clouds of hot gas and glowing dust along with tons of glowing ash. At that point, a great number of residents probably wished that they had, like the locally adored poet Philodemus, gone elsewhere.

Melicertes and his mother, sea-blue queen of the deep,

Leucothea, goddess against evil,

And dancing Nereids, and waves, and Poseidon,

And Zephyrus eek of the gentlest breath,

Be good and bear me clean over the big swells

Safe and sound to the sweet shore of Piraeus.

—(G. Economou, 1987)

Late the following day, heavy rains commenced and the ground was soaked for three days until mudslides flowed down the flanks of Vesuvius covering the town and the villas with a deep blanket of ash, rock, and mud, and bringing a silence that lasted many years. In 1709 well-diggers uncovered evidence of buried marble sculptures, and in 1738 the military engineer Roque de Alcubierre began excavations for the King of Naples, Charles III. Numerous sculptures, murals, and remnants of buildings were dug up as over ninety bronze and marble statues were recovered.² Early reports from the site that told it was still contaminated with poisonous volcanic gases after many hundreds of years made excavators leery of further work; but by 1750 a long, narrow passage had been hacked below the sixty-nine-foot ash layer, and King Charles and his wife, the Queen Consort Maria Amalia, encouraged the excavations.

Over time they decorated one whole wing of their summer palace in the nearby town of Portici with artwork from Herculaneum. Ten years later, Alcubierre transferred his interest to a neighboring site that had been identified as Pompeii. He charged his assistant Karl Weber with drawing up a plan of the Herculaneum excavation. Weber’s plan included the remains of a large villa called the Villa Calpurnia that had once belonged to Lucius Calpurnius Piso, scourge of Cicero and father-in-law to Julius Caesar. Piso was one of the richest Romans of his day. In 1752 word came that 250 rolls of papyrus had been found in that villa. Subsequently, it became known as the Villa dei Papiri.

images — Villa dei Papiri with the location of papyri found, some stacked on shelves. (Dr. M. Capasso, with permission).

The announcement in Europe of the discovery of ancient books was treated as extraordinary news. By then the Enlightenment was in full swing; people had begun reading extensively. Philosophy, the science of reason, was being devoured and digested, leaving behind an enormous appetite. Original and new books of the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers were exactly what were needed, perhaps accompanied by a few small volumes of delightful and meaningful ancient poetry or prose. Many thought the works of Virgil and Livy would be forthcoming. Until then, other than the old papyrus church documents in Latin and occasional fragments from Egypt, papyrus paper had been considered history, and the plant itself had been forgotten. In fact, it was only in the following year 1753 that Carolus Linnaeus (Carl von Linné) got around to giving it its official Latin name, Cyperus papyrus. But he was in no doubt that it was a thing of the past, since a colleague of his had traveled the length of Egypt in 1752 and found that it had disappeared.

The news from Herculaneum unleashed a torrent of interest. Then came the details, the objects found resembled nothing more than lumps of coal. It was announced in Philosophical Transactions, the science journal of the Royal Society of London that year that yes, they were ancient papyrus paper books, and yes, there were hundreds of them, but sadly, they had been “turn’d to a sort of charcoal, so brittle, that, being touched, it falls readily into ashes.”³

Back in Naples, realizing that the world was looking over his shoulders, Charles, who was a conscientious collector, formed an Institute that would record and look after those items that could not be transported to his house. It was here that the charred scrolls were deposited under tight security. The enormous interest from the public forced him to keep the excavations highly controlled. No visitor, of which there were now hundreds, was allowed to use a pencil, the equivalent of today’s proscription, “No photos, please!”

The first attempts to read the rolls began under the direction of Camillo Paderni, an Italian artist and newly appointed head of the Institute. He simply cut several lengthwise down the center like so many cucumbers, and was astounded when they fell apart and crumbled into black dust. Next, the Duke of Sansevero, a personal friend of the king and a budding alchemist, tried his luck. Judith Harris describes the results in her book, Pompeii Awakened. He soaked several in a pot of mercury and the scrolls dissolved completely.⁴ Then came a Neapolitan philologist who was convinced that strong sunlight would vaporize the ink and leave behind an impression against the charred surface that could be read. Disappointingly, exposure wiped out both the ink and the impression. Rosewater was tried next, which was a disaster but left the rolls smelling better than the next treatment tried by an Italian chemist using “vegetable gas,” a dreadful odor (think rotting cabbages) that drove everyone from the room, including the courtiers and ladies drawn there to witness the first readings of the words contained on these precious rolls.⁵

All of these efforts were to no avail; the learned world would have to wait. And so they were left sitting on the edges of their chairs.

Finally, an expert, Padre Antonio Piaggio, a calligrapher from the Vatican, was called in. Because of his two callings as a monk and a calligrapher, who, by necessity must work with care and attention, Piaggio’s slow and patient attitude incensed the impatient Camillo Paderni, who needed immediate results. The Institute, now his responsibility, had begun, in his own words, “under straitened circumstances.” It would never succeed if it were burdened by what he called these “useless things,” which contained “no element of noble erudition.” Besides that they were “torn” and “impossible to repair.” To the horror of Padre Antonio, Paderni continued to slice, poke and pry at the rolls, while the saintly monk built and perfected a machine.

Described as a marvel of its day, it was equipped with slender silk threads gummed gently to the fragile ashed remains of papyrus that it lifted with care from the surface of the rolls, which had been moistened with a special liquor. This delicate film was unrolled onto a membrane to support it. He could unroll a few millimeters during the course of a whole day, a full scroll would require four years. Padremi tore his hair out, there was nothing to do but wait.

And so, in a classic rerun of the race between the tortoise and the hare, Piaggio won, but as usual in such cases, his exasperated boss Paderni made the first announcement and therefore received the credit. In 1755 he let the world know that the Greek writings on the papyrus scrolls “favored the writings of Epicurus.”

In 1793, three years before he died, the first of Piaggio’s work was finally published and the world learned that after forty years of waiting, there were to be no manuscripts of Virgil or lost books of Livy. Instead everyone had to be content with an essay on music by Philodemus, a follower of the Epicurean school of philosophy; though it miraculously saw the light of day after seventeen hundred years, this was poor fare for the starving. As Professor James Porter of University of California Berkeley pointed out in his elegant essay, “Hearing Voices: The Herculaneum Papyri and Classical Scholarship,” the original expectations of discovery had been shared by an entire generation. Their search for books, or at least manuscripts in codex form, ended in utter desperation; they were dazed by what they found, the charred lumps defied description as literary objects. A further frustration set in with the news that many were the works of the Epicurean Philodemus, the same man who rejected classical culture! There was a reason for this special interest in Epicureanism by the wealthy upper-class Roman elite of the region; it offered them “a compelling alternative to the chaos of political turmoil and the stress of urban existence.” In other words, it was their New Age culture.

Those in London who had been waiting patiently through all those years of Paderni’s fumbling now turned away. They had other things to think about. The newly formed French First Republic had declared war on England and by the end of 1793 the Reign of Terror had started.

The work in Naples waited until Reverend John Hayter arrived in 1800. It continued from there under the direction of people using methods based on hands-on experience and research. Still, interest remained high enough to look further, dig deeper, and probe more extensively, a sentiment voiced by William Wordsworth who wrote in 1819:

O ye, who patiently explore

The wreck of Herculaneum lore,

What rapture! could ye seize

Some Theban fragment, or unroll

One precious, tender-hearted, scroll.

Despite their disappointment, the Western world never ceased longing. Today we are encouraged further by the great strides in our understanding. The art of multispectral scanning of the carbonized papyri, the building of a replica of the Villa dei Papiri in California by the Getty Foundation, the organization of official research into antiquities, and the museum at Herculaneum all help. In addition, an inspired effort at research funding and two and a half centuries of media attention has kept the interest of the general public focused on the prospect of finding, “One precious, tender-hearted, scroll . . .”

It also helps that two best-selling authors maintain a long-running interest in the charred papyrus scrolls. The concerns of Shirley Hazzard and Robert Harris are well known. Hazzard devoted columns to the rolls in her August 1983 New Yorker story on papyrology, as well as a New York Times story on Herculaneum in 1987, and her coauthored 2008 book, The Ancient Shore. Elsewhere, she has called attention to an eighteenth century trade whereby the king of Naples bartered some of the Herculaneum papyri for live kangaroos; presumably an equally rare and valuable commodity in those days.

Alexandre Dumas used this incident in a historical novel, The Neapolitan Lovers, where he had Ferdinand IV trade with the English envoy to Naples, Lord Hamilton (the husband of Lady Hamilton, the famous mistress of the celebrated Admiral Nelson) and hoping that Lord Hamilton “has not deceived me in saying that the kangaroo is a rare animal, I hope, or I shall regret my papyri. They were found at Herculaneum. Hamilton, an amateur of that sort of old rubbish, saw them; he spoke of the kangaroos, and I told him I wanted to try and acclimatize some. So he asked if I would give the London Museum as many rolls of papyrus as the Zoological Gardens there would give me kangaroos. I said, ‘Bring over the kangaroos as quick as you can!’ Yesterday eighteen arrived, and I have given him eighteen papyri.”

One of the protagonists, an English banker, says, “Sir William has not made a bad bargain, perhaps he has got Tacitus’ panegyric on Virginius, his speech against the pro consul Marcus-Priscus, or his last poems.” It worried the king that he had indeed made a poor bargain, the rolls he gave up might have contained a classic. But we now know better. King Ferdinand can rest in peace, since the chances are 99 percent that the British Museum scrolls, if ever unrolled, will reveal nothing more precious than more essays from our old friend Philodemus.

Hazzard’s patience wears thin when it comes to the question of why the remainder of the ancient library and possibly thousands more papyrus scrolls are left to languish under the lava beds, not far from her beloved Naples. In this she joins Robert Harris who, following the success of his 2003 novel Pompeii, increased the pressure to uncover the remaining parts of the Villa dei Papiri.

Robert Fowler, professor of classics at Bristol University, in an interview in December 2013 with Robin Banerji of the BBC pointed out that near the room where many of the original scrolls were found, and on the same level, is a section of the villa that has never been dug up.⁶ There is also a range of well-furnished rooms with views out to sea, and Fowler remains hopeful that the villa could yet yield a trove of ancient scrolls. But the Italian authorities are reluctant to permit further excavation, arguing that this would be disruptive for residents of the modern town of Ercolano, built literally on top of Herculaneum. They also point out that 300–400 of the original rolls remain unread.

In the meantime, Harris and Fowler keep up the pressure by reminding everyone of the possibility of another big eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which might end our chances of recovering anything else forever.

In summary, the conclusion after many years of research seems to be that the villa was not only a holiday home, it was also a mouseion, a place to show off Piso’s collection of literature and art, especially sculpture. As to the scrolls, most are philosophical works in Greek, many by Philodemus, but other works have been found including a comedy in Latin by Caecilius Statius called Faenerator, or The Usurer, about a young man who borrows money at high interest to get his girlfriend out of the hands of a pimp.

Another extraordinary result of the interest in the Herculaneum story was the decision by the wealthy financier and philanthropist J. Paul Getty to build a replica of the villa in Malibu, California. Working from the original plans drawn up by Karl Weber in the eighteenth century, the Getty Villa was built and opened in 1974 and became part of the Getty Museum complex. Getty, who died in 1976, never visited the villa.

Stephen Garrett, architect and former director of the Getty Museum,⁷ tells us that J. Paul Getty had a clear view about what he wanted to achieve in doing this. “He wanted a person that came there to get some idea of what a villa way back 2000 years would actually have felt like.”

In the same spirit of what it must have felt like walking around the original villa in ancient Italy, the thousands of papyri were as much an integral part of the scene as the gardens that are now so nicely re-created in Malibu. As James Porter said, “One of the great virtues of dealing with papyri is that they help us view documents of classical history as objects and not only as texts.”⁸

As far as I can see, the replica of the villa is incomplete. It lacks a reproduction of the library, or a reading room, or even a book storage cabinet that would be close to the original places in which papyri were found. We already have a fictional description from Robert Harris in his book as to what the rooms looked like. Would it be too much to hope that someday a major museum would re-create a library of papyrus scrolls? As far as I know, such a thing does not exist. Such a display would overcome one difficulty that has arisen: today there is a paucity of intact ancient scrolls. Of the millions upon millions extant between 3000 B.C. and 900 A.D., only a few are found intact today. In museums such as the British Museum, there are a few small, unrolled scrolls from tombs. Thousands of intact scrolls were acquired in Victorian times (400 at the British Museum alone), but virtually all were cut into pieces and mounted under glass for study. Today many of these are left in storage, another reason why a small library of intact replica scrolls would be an attractive exhibit. Indeed, re-creating the Epicurean library of scrolls from the original villa would give the modern day papermakers of Egypt a chance to perfect and widen the scope of their work. Many of the papermakers in Cairo, Luxor, and the delta have access to fresh papyrus as well as tons of dried strips. Beside their expertise, artists and materials are readily available to re-create what is needed.