New: Blacklin’s Weekly Find From 3QuarksDaily
Posted by blacklin on August 17, 2008
In the spirit of Fair Use and Copyright Compliance, I contacted 3quarksdaily to make sure that the above named new feature of Blacklin’s Reading Room Reviews & More would be “okay” to set in motion. I didn’t know if I would be infringing on any of their policies, so I sent an email to get “the green light.” 3quarksdaily has graciously given me the “go ahead.” So much of their content seems to fit the concept of The Reading Room that I thought it might be cool to have a weekly selection posted here. So here goes: Every Sunday keep an eye out for a weekly post called Blacklin’s Weekly Find From 3QuarksDaily. See below for the first post of this new feature of Blacklin’s Reading Room Reviews & More, and thank you to 3quarksdaily for their permission to proceed with this project.
About 3quarksdaily: Again, except for Mondays (when only original articles are posted) 3quarksdaily is a filter blog that provides snippets of interesting articles from across the Web. A link to the original post’s site is provided at the end of the “teaser” so that you can read the entire article.
This first edition of Blacklin’s Weekly Find From 3QuarksDaily is the article: The Only Library of the Ancient World. I have included the link to The Australian so that you can read the piece in its entirety. If you visit the article’s original posting site, you can also view a picture of one the library’s texts.
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.
more from The Australian here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 12:44 PM at 3quarksdaily on August 16, 2008.
