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A pair of 2,000-year-old Roman scrolls believed to have belonged to the family of Julius Caesar, and were buried and charred during Vesuvius’ eruption, have been virtually “unwrapped” for the first time ever. The scrolls, known as the Herculaneum Scrolls, are too fragile to be handled by hand, so researchers needed to use the X-ray beam at Diamond Light Source, as well as a “virtual unwrapping” software to detect the carbon ink on them. “Texts from the ancient world are rare and precious, and they simply cannot be revealed through any other known process,” University of Kentucky professor Brent Seales,...

Six years ago, Dan Wallace announced in a debate with Bart Ehrman that a paleographer had dated a recently-found papyrus fragment of Mark to the first century. Since then, I’ve received many requests for updates, and I finally have one to give. The fragment has now been published, and there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that its official date is late second or early third century. Dan Wallace has written a post explaining what happened and offering an apology. Here’s a brief excerpt: In my debate with Bart, I mentioned that I had it on...

The New Testament PapyriThis is part 10 of my 12-part series on the archaeological evidence for the Bible. This week we discussed the New Testament papyri discoveries and how they've changed our view of the Early Church.(Click here for last week's video, which was on the Dead Sea Scrolls)A bit of a correction; the Great Library of Alexandria was destroyed before the time of Christ, in about 48 BC by Julius Caesar. After some confusion, I had to double check this and apparently there was a SECOND smaller library built in its place that was destroyed by fire during the...

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Dating back to the days of the Pharaoh Khufu, or Cheops in the Fourth Dynasty, the harbor dates back 4,500 years. The Great Pyramid of Giza serves as the tomb of Khufu, who died around 2566 B.C. The harbor was built on the Red Sea shore in the Wadi al-Jarf area, 112 miles south of Suez. The harbor was discovered by a French-Egyptian mission from the French Institute for Archaeological Studies. The site "predates by more than 1,000 years any other port structure known in the world," according to the mission's director, Pierre...

Cairo (AFP) - The Egyptian Museum in Cairo is showcasing for the first time the earliest writing from ancient Egypt found on papyrus, detailing work on the Great Pyramid of Giza, antiquities officials said Thursday. The papyri were discovered near Wadi el-Jarf port, 25 kilometres (15 miles) south of the Gulf of Suez town of Zafarana, the antiquities ministry said. The find by a French-Egyptian team unearths papers telling of the daily lives of port workers who transported huge limestone blocks to Cairo during King Khufu's rule to build the Great Pyramid, intended to be his burial structure. One document...

The desert swallowed Tebtunis in the twelfth century A.D., so the town does not appear on any maps. We know its name, and a great deal more, from the tens of thousands of papyrus fragments found throughout the twentieth century by a succession of archaeologists, including those working at the site today. These records, which range from pieces found in ancient garbage dumps, to sheets recycled as wrappings for mummies, to five-yard-long scrolls, include literary texts and records of private contracts and public acts. "The papyri give us particular and historic information that cannot be found elsewhere," says Claudio Gallazzi,...

Astonishingly, the papyri were written by men who participated in the building of the Great Pyramid, the tomb of the Pharaoh Khufu, the first and largest of the three colossal pyramids at Giza just outside modern Cairo. Among the papyri was the journal of a previously unknown official named Merer, who led a crew of some 200 men who traveled from one end of Egypt to the other picking up and delivering goods of one kind or another. Merer, who accounted for his time in half-day increments, mentions stopping at Tura, a town along the Nile famous for its limestone...

At first glance, the ancient Egyptian texts look like scraps of garbage. And more than 2,000 years ago, that's exactly what they were -- discarded documents, useless contracts and unwanted letters that were recycled into material needed to plaster over mummies, like some precursor to papier-mache... The texts, collectively called papyri, were donated to Stanford in the 1920s by an alumnus who bought them from an antiquities dealer in London. They've been overlooked by generations of faculty who haven't focused on papyrology, said Joe Manning, an associate professor of classics... About 70 texts in Stanford's collection of several hundred papyri...

Is it true that the papyri from which the Book of Abraham was translated have been found, and that it has been proven that they do not contain the writings of Abraham? Anonymous Answer this Question -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Webmaster de AllAboutMormons.com from La Jolla, California: The manuscripts from which Joseph Smith translated the Book of Abraham eventually ended up in Chicago, and many of them were destroyed in the great Chicago fire of 1871. While some fragments of these manuscripts were later discovered to have survived the fire, much of the original text had been destroyed. Contemporaries of Joseph Smith described...

The unique library of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, buried beneath lava by Vesuvius's eruption in AD79, is slowly revealing its long-held secretsSTORED 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...

For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure – a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible. Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed. In the past four days alone, Oxford’s classicists have used it to make...

Focus: The search for the lost library of RomeRobert HarrisEven in our age of hyperbole, it would be hard to exaggerate the significance of what is at stake here: nothing less than the lost intellectual inheritance of western civilisation Down a side street in the seedy Italian town of Ercolano, wafted by the scent of uncollected rubbish and the fumes of passing motor-scooters, lies a waterlogged hole. A track leads from it to a high fence and a locked gate. Dogs defecate in the undergrowth where addicts discard their needles. Peering into the dark, stagnant water it is hard to...

Recent News! They discover proof that Atlantis did not submerge complete but only one part...By Salvador Morales. Atlantis News Agency. Madrid, Spain. 01-06-2005. The Spanish investigator and scriptologist, Georgeos Diaz-Montexano, has discovered paleographical proofs that in fact the island or peninsula (Nêsos) denominated like Atlantis or Atlantic, it was divided in two parts below the sea. To date all atlantologists and students of the Timaeus and the Critias de Plato had thought that in texts of the Greek philosophist narrated the collapse of the all island or Atlantis peninsula, nevertheless, Georgeos Diaz-Montexano has reviewed the oldest texts known writings in...