page_title: Herculaneum papyri
section_title: Early attempts
hierarchical_section_title: Herculaneum papyri / Unrolling / Early attempts
caption_attribution_description: English: Device to unroll papyri, Napoli. Abbot Antonio Piaggio developed this machine. https://thephraser.com/2015/03/30/herculaneum-papyri-in-the-national-library-in-naples/
context_page_description: The Herculaneum papyri are more than 1,800 papyri found in the Herculaneum Villa of the Papyri, in the 18th century, carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.
  The papyri, containing a number of Greek philosophical texts, come from the only surviving library from antiquity that exists in its entirety. Most of the works discovered are associated with the Epicurean philosopher and poet Philodemus of Gadara.
context_section_description: Following the discovery of the Herculaneum papyri in 1752, per the advice from Bernardo Tanucci, King Charles VII of Naples established a commission to study them.
  Possibly the first attempts to read the scrolls were done by the artist Camillo Paderni who was in charge of recovered items. Paderni used the method of slicing scrolls in half, copying readable text, by removing papyri layers. This transcription procedure was used for hundreds of scrolls, and in the process destroyed them.
  In 1756, Abbot Piaggio, conserver of ancient manuscripts in the Vatican Library, used a machine he also invented, to unroll the first scroll, which took four years (millimeters per day). The results were then swiftly copied (since the writing rapidly disappeared: see below), reviewed by Hellenist academics, and then corrected once more, if necessary, by the unrolling/copying team.
  In 1802, King Ferdinand IV of Naples appointed Rev. John Hayter to assist the process.
  From 1802 to 1806, Hayter unrolled and partly deciphered some 200 papyri. These copies are held in the Bodleian Library, where they are known as the "Oxford Facsimiles of the Herculaneum Papyri".
  In January 1816, Pierre-Claude Molard and Raoul Rochette led an attempt to unroll one papyrus with a replica of Abbot Piaggio's machine. However, the entire scroll was destroyed without any information being obtained.
  From 1819 until 1820, Humphry Davy was commissioned by the Prince Regent George IV to work on the Herculaneum papyri. Although it is considered that he had only limited success, Davy's chemical method, using chlorine managed to partially unroll 23 manuscripts.
  In 1877, a papyrus was taken to a laboratory in the Louvre. An attempt to unravel it was made with a "small mill", but it was unsuccessful and was partially destroyed, leaving only a quarter intact.
  By the middle of the 20th century, only 585 rolls or fragments had been completely unrolled, and 209 unrolled in part. Of the unrolled papyri, about 200 had been deciphered and published, and about 150 only deciphered.
caption: Abbot Piaggio machine was used to unroll scrolls as early as 1756 in the Vatican Library.
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