The papyrus and the volcano
Outside/In
NHPR
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 16 May 2024
⏱️ 33 minutes
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Summary
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey Nate. |
| 0:03.0 | Hey, justine. |
| 0:05.0 | Our journey today begins in Italy. |
| 0:08.0 | Way back in 1750. |
| 0:10.0 | We're on the southwestern coast, right on the Mediterranean, and a group of people are busy digging a well. |
| 0:17.0 | And while they're digging, their shovels start to hit, not soil soil but this. |
| 0:25.0 | Whoa! |
| 0:28.0 | They hit what looks to be... |
| 0:30.0 | Is that tile? |
| 0:32.0 | Yeah, it's like a mosaic. |
| 0:33.0 | To me it's almost fractally. |
| 0:35.0 | It looks like a marble rug. |
| 0:38.0 | It's beautiful. |
| 0:40.0 | It's beautiful. It turned out that this was a patterned marble floor which had been buried in volcanic ash because this villa was once part of the ancient town of Herculaneum just outside of Pompeii. |
| 0:52.0 | Oh, that Pompeii. |
| 0:54.0 | The one that was almost completely buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius almost 2,000 years ago. |
| 0:59.0 | People eventually figured out that this villa probably belonged to Julius Caesar's father-in-law. |
| 1:05.9 | And so it was lavish, complete with dozens of bronze and marble statues and an Olympic swimming |
| 1:11.6 | pool. |
| 1:13.0 | But the real treasure was in the library. |
| 1:16.0 | Excavators eventually found hundreds of papyrus scrolls, each of them containing |
| 1:27.1 | invaluable writings on classical philosophy. |
... |
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