Cups and scrolls

I recently finished the outstanding novel The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, which tells the story of the events of The Iliad, focusing on the doomed love affair between Achilles and Patroclus (it's told from Patroclus's point of view).  The best novelizations of history and historical fiction -- other examples that come to mind are Robert Graves's I, Claudius and Claudius the God, Sigrid Undset's Kristen Lavransdatter and The Master of Hestviken, and Guy Gavriel Kay's Under Heaven -- don't just tell a story but actually transport you back into a different time and place.  They succeed at portraying the underlying humanity we share with all people, however far back you go, while communicating the fascinating otherness we experience when immersed in a different culture.

It's this same curiosity about other times and places that explains why I'm fascinated with archaeology.  The idea of seeing, or even touching, an item that was handled by people hundreds or thousands of years ago is an absolute thrill.  This is why I was so excited to read two wonderful pieces of research sent my way by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia.

The first one is why I started this post with The Song of Achilles, because it's a study of an artifact called Nestor's Cup, a 2,800 ceramic vessel with the inscription, "I am Nestor's Cup, good to drink from.  Whoever drinks this cup empty, straightaway the desire for beautiful-crowned Aphrodite will seize him."

As an aside, I'm not sure that getting the hots for Aphrodite would, in the long run, be a good thing.  In The Iliad and The Odyssey the gods mostly come across as petulant, willful, and perpetually horny teenagers, and mortals were generally better off avoiding getting noticed by them.  As far as Nestor himself, he's over and over called "a great and wise counselor," but if you know the story, this comes across as a little weird because Nestor is the one who convinced Agamemnon to take the Achaeans into battle (with disastrous results), and was also the one who gave Patroclus the advice that ended up getting him killed.

So if Nestor handed me a cup and said, "Hey, drink this and Aphrodite will be ready to hop in bed with you!" I doubt I'd be all that inclined to take him up on it.

Be that as it may, the artifact itself is fascinating.  It was found in a burial site in Pithekoussai, a Greek colony on the island of Ischia (currently owned by Italy).  It may have originally been used as a drinking vessel, as per the inscription, but in the eighth century B.C.E. it was buried along with the ashes of three adults, and various other fancy and expensive items.

"Our research rewrites the history and the previous archaeological interpretation of the tomb, throwing new light on funeral practices, culture and society of the Greek immigrants in the ancient West Mediterranean," said study co-author Melania Gigante.  "Pithekoussai is widely considered one of the most important archaeological findings of pre-classical Mediterranean archaeology."

The other story comes from an even more famous site -- Herculaneum, which along with Pompeii was destroyed by a catastrophic pyroclastic flow from Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E.  Wealthy communities like Pompeii and Herculaneum were mostly inhabited by the Roman upper crust, who were well-read and owned extensive libraries.

Unfortunately, Roman books and scrolls -- being made of parchment or paper -- would have been incinerated during the eruption, as the material in pyroclastic flows can easily reach a temperature of 1,000 C.  However, the temperatures rose (and then dropped) so fast, and the remains then blanketed by ash, that the scrolls in the libraries weren't burned to cinders but instead were carbonized in situ, where they were found, still rolled up, when the ruins were excavated.

The problem is that these blackened cylinders are exceptionally fragile.  Unrolling them would immediately cause them to crumble into tiny fragments.  So while there might be traces of the ink left behind, how could you ever open them up to see it?

It was impossible... until now.

Using a non-invasive laser imager and a complex machine-learning algorithm, archaeologist Luke Farritor of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has succeeded in discerning a single word -- πορϕυρας, meaning "purple" -- in a proof-of-concept that gives antiquarians hope of reading at least some of Herculaneum's damaged scrolls.

The most exciting part is that the majority of the documents we have from the Greeks and Romans are copies of copies of copies that finally made their way into medieval libraries.  The inevitable errors (not to mention deliberate editing) from this kind of literary Game of Telephone mean that we really have no idea how close our versions are to the originals.  If we could read the scrolls of Herculaneum, this would bring us one step closer to seeing what the ancients actually wrote, as well as opening up the thrilling possibility of recovering works that were thought to be lost forever.

So that's the news from the world of antiquity.  My thanks to the eagle-eyed reader who sent me the links.  Now I think I'll sit and drink my coffee (from an ordinary, non-Aphrodite-summoning mug) and ponder what it was like to live thousands of years ago, and see -- at least faintly -- through the eyes of the ancients.

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Brain of glass

Because my other option is to go on a crazed rant about how my country is being run by an amoral sociopath, and about how even given that fact thirty-some-odd percent of Americans still support him and/or idolize him, I decided to look instead at a more cheerful topic: the remains of a young man who got fried by Mount Vesuvius on August 24, 79 C.E.

That eruption gives new meaning to the word "colossal."  It was what geologists call a Plinian eruption -- named, in fact, for author and philosopher Pliny the Elder, who was also killed that day -- one that instead of producing the fountains of lava you see from volcanoes like Kilauea, produces pyroclastic surges composed of ash and superheated air that can reach speeds of one hundred meters per second and temperatures over a thousand degrees Celsius.

In other words, once you see it coming, it's too late to do much besides sticking your head between your legs and kissing your ass goodbye.

(If you want to watch a fantastic -- if terrifying -- ten-minute simulation of what Vesuvius would have looked like from Pompeii on the fateful day, check this out.)

In any case, the eruption in 79 C. E. killed at least twenty thousand people -- probably more -- and released an unimaginable amount of energy in a very short time, estimated to be one hundred thousand times more than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.  The city of Pompeii was basically flattened where it stood, and its inhabitants flash-cooked and then encased in ash, which is why researchers have found molds and casts of human bodies (and one dog), still in the positions they were in when they died.

This discovery, though -- the news of which I once again owe my pal Andrew Butters, author and blogger over at Potato Chip Math -- is unique, and is as fascinating as it is gruesome.  A team at University of Naples Federico II discovered the remains of a twenty-five-year-old man in a temple in Herculaneum dedicated to the Emperor Augustus.  He was face down, still lying where he fell.  But when the researchers took a look inside his skull, they got a surprise.

His brain had turned to glass, so quickly that his individual neurons are still visible.  Pier Paolo Petrone, who led the research, said in an interview with CNN, "The brain exposed to the hot volcanic ash must first have liquefied and then immediately turned into a glassy material by the rapid cooling of the volcanic ash deposit."

Here's how the team explains what happened, in their paper, that appeared last week in the journal PLoS-One:

In AD 79 the town of Herculaneum was suddenly hit and overwhelmed by volcanic ash-avalanches that killed all its remaining residents, as also occurred in Pompeii and other settlements as far as 20 kilometers from Vesuvius.  New investigations on the victims' skeletons unearthed from the ash deposit filling 12 waterfront chambers have now revealed widespread preservation of atypical red and black mineral residues encrusting the bones, which also impregnate the ash filling the intracranial cavity and the ash-bed encasing the skeletons.  Here we show the unique detection of large amounts of iron and iron oxides from such residues, as revealed by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry and Raman microspectroscopy, thought to be the final products of heme iron upon thermal decomposition.  The extraordinarily rare preservation of significant putative evidence of hemoprotein thermal degradation from the eruption victims strongly suggests the rapid vaporization of body fluids and soft tissues of people at death due to exposure to extreme heat.

Without further ado, here's a microphotograph of the neurons they found:

Vesuvius remains one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world, and will have another large eruption at some point -- not if, but when.  And this time, it isn't a couple of towns with twenty thousand folks in the bullseye; right downslope from Vesuvius is the city of Naples, which has just shy of a million inhabitants.

The good news in all this is that volcanologists have gotten much better at detecting the danger signals prior to an eruption -- much better than, for example, the seismologists have of predicting when an earthquake might occur.  But as humans have shown time and time again, we really suck at taking the advice of scientists, preferring instead the reassurances of people who honestly don't know what they're talking about, and the time-honored maxim of "everything will be fine, just like it always is."

Which brings us full circle to Donald Trump and his brazen, idiotic, selfish *Gordon lapses into mumbled obscenities* comment not to be "afraid of COVID" or "let it dominate your life."  Despite the fact that worldwide, a million people have died (i.e. the population of Naples), and twenty percent of those have been in the United States.

Okay, I feel a rant coming on again, so I better stop here. 

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One of my favorite TED talks is by the neurophysiologist David Eagleman, who combines two things that don't always show up together; intelligence and scientific insight, and the ability to explain complex ideas in a way that a layperson can understand and appreciate.

His first book, Incognito, was a wonderful introduction to the workings of the human brain, and in my opinion is one of the best books out there on the subject.  So I was thrilled to see he had a new book out -- and this one is the Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week.

In Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain, Eagleman looks at the brain in a new way; not as a static bunch of parts that work together to power your mind and your body, but as a dynamic network that is constantly shifting to maximize its efficiency.  What you probably learned in high school biology -- that your brain never regenerates lost neurons -- is misleading.  It may be true that you don't grow any new neural cells, but you're always adding new connections and new pathways.

Understanding how this happens is the key to figuring out how we learn.

In his usual fascinating fashion, Eagleman lays out the frontiers of neuroscience, giving you a glimpse of what's going on inside your skull as you read his book -- which is not only amusingly self-referential, but is kind of mind-blowing.  I can't recommend his book highly enough.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Pulled from the fires

Note bene: If you haven't read Umberto Eco's brilliant medieval murder mystery The Name of the Rose and are planning to, be aware that the next couple of paragraphs contain spoilers.  If you'd like to read the book and don't want to know the solution, skip down to the stars!

One of the most devastating scenes in The Name of the Rose happens right near the end, when the main characters, the Sherlock-Holmes-like Brother William of Baskerville and his friend and pupil, Brother Adso of Melk, confront the murderous old religious nutter Brother Jorge of Burgos in the place that is the center of all the action -- the labyrinthine Library at the top of the Aedificium of the (unnamed) monastery where the story takes place.  The Library was built not to collect and disperse knowledge but to hide it; Librarian after Librarian voraciously hoarded manuscripts of all sorts but always wanted to be in control of who got to read what, feeling that some books were not fit reading material for anyone but the most holy.

Brother Jorge himself was the Librarian before he had to resign the position because of his failing eyesight, but still kept a tight rein over who got to read what, acting through his proxy (and the nominal Librarian after Jorge retired), Brother Malachi of Hildesheim.  And when Jorge discovered that there was a copy of a particular manuscript in the Library -- the long-lost second volume of Aristotle's Poetics -- that implied that the main purpose of living was not prayer and self-mortification but laughter and joy, he was willing to go to any length to stop people from finding out about it and (in his mind) destroying the solemn foundation of the Church itself.  In the end, he sets fire to the Library, destroying all of the thousands of irreplaceable manuscripts (and himself in the process) rather than let Brother William get his hands on the copy and make others aware of its existence.

All through the book, the Library was built up to mythic proportions.  Eco recreates in us a sense of what it must have been like to witness the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, an event that it pains me to think about even now.  But now, some scientists have found a way to salvage at least some manuscripts thought lost to fire forever.

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Everyone's familiar with the devastation Mount Vesuvius wrought on the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum on the 29th of August in the year 79 C.E.  If you haven't already done so, you should watch this amazing, nine-minute-long animation that puts you right in the middle of the eruption -- something that makes me very, very thankful I'm in a tectonically benign part of the world.

The main explosion of the volcano occurred at about one o'clock in the afternoon (we have a good account of the details from the historian Pliny the Younger, who witnessed the cataclysm and survived, and his uncle Pliny the Elder -- who wasn't so lucky).  The blowout vaporized a good chunk of the top of the mountain and triggered a pyroclastic surge that geologists estimate was around 300 C and traveling at over 100 kilometers an hour.  Anyone who had survived the previous rains of ash and rock that morning was flash-fried, and then covered up by 25 meters of volcanic ash deposited in the six hours that followed.

Some artifacts survived.  Buildings (although damaged by the pyroclastic flow and the concomitant earthquakes) were found preserved when excavations began in earnest in the eighteenth century.  Tiles and paintings were remarkably unscathed, and there are pieces of art from the ruined city that look like they were created yesterday.  Rather horrifyingly, there are casts and molds of a good many of the victims, who were cooked by the blast, encased in ash, and then once their bodies decayed, the cavity was filled with minerals seeping in, leaving bizarre human shapes still in the contorted positions where they fell.

Anything else made of organic matter, though, was pretty well incinerated.  Any bits of charred wood that survived rotted away within a few years after the eruption.  Even less likely to survive were parchments -- written records -- although the carbonized remains of almost two thousand scrolls were found when the city of Herculaneum was excavated.

Tantalizing to think there still could be readable information there, to wonder what lost treasures of literature and history those blackened cylinders might be.  But there was no way to see if anything was still there other than ash, nor a way to unroll them and find out without having them crumble to powder...

... until now.

Brent Seales of the University of Kentucky, working with a team made up of Jens Dopke, Francoise Berard, Christy Chapman, Robert Atwood, and Thomas Connolley, has pioneered a technique that hinges on the fact that a lot of the inks used by the ancients had traces of lead and other heavy metals which are still present in the tracery of script on the burned fragments.  By taking the scrolls -- without unwrapping them and causing further damage -- and using a targeted beam of x-rays, scientists can see inside them and possibly piece together what the text actually said.

One of the scrolls charred by Vesuvius and recovered from Herculaneum

"A new historical work by Seneca the Elder was discovered among the unidentified Herculaneum papyri only last year, thus showing what uncontemplated rarities remain to be discovered there," said Dirk Obbink of the University of Oxford, who has worked with the team to train the algorithm to read the burned scrolls using parchments that have already been (at least partially) deciphered.  "It's my hope that the scrolls might even contain lost works, such as poems by Sappho or the treatise Mark Antony wrote on his own drunkenness.  I would very much like to be able to read that one."

As would a lot of us.  The idea that something thought lost forever might be restored is thrilling, and the work Seales's team is doing is groundbreaking.  Until we develop time travel and go back to save the manuscripts from the Library of Alexandria, it's our best chance to find new primary sources from the ancients -- something that historians, and bibliophiles like myself, have dreamed about for years.

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I am not someone who generally buys things impulsively after seeing online ads, so the targeted ad software that seems sometimes to be listening to our conversations is mostly lost on me.  But when I saw an ad for the new book by physicist James Trefil and astronomer Michael Summers, Imagined Life, it took me about five seconds to hit "purchase."

The book is about exobiology -- the possibility of life outside of Earth.  Trefil and Summers look at the conditions and events that led to life here on the home planet (after all, the only test case we have), then extrapolate to consider what life elsewhere might be like.  They look not only at "Goldilocks" worlds like our own -- so-called because they're "juuuuust right" in terms of temperature -- but ice worlds, gas giants, water worlds, and even "rogue planets" that are roaming around in the darkness of space without orbiting a star.  As far as the possible life forms, they imagine "life like us," "life not like us," and "life that's really not like us," always being careful to stay within the known laws of physics and chemistry to keep our imaginations in check and retain a touchstone for what's possible.

It's brilliant reading, designed for anyone with an interest in science, science fiction, or simply looking up at the night sky with astonishment.  It doesn't require any particular background in science, so don't worry about getting lost in the technical details.  Their lucid and entertaining prose will keep you reading -- and puzzling over what strange creatures might be out there looking at us from their own home worlds and wondering if there's any life down there on that little green-and-blue planet orbiting the Sun.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

An avalanche of fire

One of the most utterly terrifying phenomena on Earth is called a pyroclastic flow.

Pyroclastic flows are explosive eruptions of volcanoes that release not molten rock, but finely pulverized debris and hot gases that then flow downhill at an astonishing rate -- in some cases, forming a cloud at a temperature of 1000 C moving at an almost unimaginable 700 kilometers per hour.  Pompeii and Herculaneum were destroyed by pyroclastic flows from Mount Vesuvius on August 24, 79 C.E., which killed everyone in their path and buried the cities under layers of ash, where they remained for centuries until being unearthed by archaeologists.

If you're not too prone to freak-out over such things, I strongly recommend this ten-minute animation that recreates the destruction of Pompeii:

More recently, a 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée on the island of Martinique triggered a pyroclastic flow that obliterated the city of Saint Pierre, killing 30,000 people in an estimated five minutes.  There were only three survivors -- Louis-Auguste Cyparis, who was lucky enough to be in an underground dungeon; Léon Compère-Léandre, who lived on the edge of town and still suffered severe burns; and Havivra Da Ifrile, who was on the beach when the eruption started and had the presence of mind to jump in a rowboat, where she was later found, unconscious and adrift, three kilometers offshore.

Saint Pierre before the eruption...

... and after:

[Images are in the Public Domain]

What has long been a mystery to volcanologists is how pyroclastic flows achieve the speeds they do, which, after all, is the key to their deadliness.  Lava flows, while they can do tremendous damage to houses and land, rarely cause loss of life because they can almost always be outrun (or in some cases, outwalked).  The fastest pyroclastic flows, on the other hand, are moving so rapidly that even if you had warning, you couldn't move quickly enough to escape.

But a paper last week in Nature describes how a team from three universities in New Zealand (Massey University, the University of Auckland, and the University of Otago) and one in the United States (the University of Oregon) created a model of pyroclastic flows, and found that the reason they travel so quickly is basically the principle of air hockey -- the cloud is suspended on a cushion of superheated air, reducing the friction to nearly zero.

In "Generation of Air Lubrication Within Pyroclastic Density Currents," by Gert Lube, Eric C. P. Breard, Jim Jones, Luke Fullard, Josef Dufek, Shane J. Cronin, and Ting Wang, we find out about a series of experiments that are not only cool but must have been extremely fun to carry out.  They built a twelve-meter-long chute, mined some volcanic particles (deposited in the 232 C.E. eruption of New Zealand's Mount Taupo), heated it up to 130 C, and sent 1000 kilograms of it at a time barreling down the chute, all the while filming it with an ultrafast camera.

As Michelle Starr, writing for Science Alert, describes the results:

[W]ithin the flow there were extremely high shear rates - the rate at which layers in a fluid flow past each other.  When shear increases, so does air pressure; and when shear rates are at their highest, that pressure produces a cushion of air just above the ground, pushing particles away from each other, with denser volcanic dust layers sliding over the top of it.

The result is that the flow keeps moving downhill at higher and higher rates until it hits an obstacle, dissipates, or cools enough that the effect diminishes and the particles slow down.

This makes me glad I live in such a benign part of the world.  Here in upstate New York, the worst we have to worry about is the occasional snowstorm, and the fact that the summers are distressingly short.  (This year, summer is scheduled for the second Thursday in July.)  But compared to living near an active volcano, or a hurricane zone, or Tornado Alley, or near a seismic fault line -- I'd say we're pretty damn fortunate.

But of all the natural disasters the Earth is capable of creating, I don't think there's anything quite as terrifying as these avalanches of fire -- unpredictable, lightning-fast, and capable of destroying everything in their path.  Compared to that, I'd choose our long, cold winters in half a heartbeat.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one; Atlas Obscura by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton.  The book is based upon a website of the same name that looks at curious, beautiful, bizarre, frightening, or fascinating places in the world -- the sorts of off-the-beaten-path destinations that you might pass by without ever knowing they exist.  (Recent entries are an astronomical observatory in Zweibrücken, Germany that has been painted to look like R2-D2; the town of Story, Indiana that is for sale for a cool $3.8 million; and the Michelin-rated kitchen run by Lewis Georgiades -- at the British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera Research Station, which only gets a food delivery once a year.)

This book collects the best of the Atlas Obscura sites, organizes them by continent, and tells you about their history.  It's a must-read for anyone who likes to travel -- preferably before you plan your next vacation.

(If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!)