Free The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt

of Herculaneum on the Bay of Naples. Buried under some sixty-five feet of volcanic debris hardened to the density of concrete, this site, where wealthy Romans had once vacationed in their elegant, colonnaded villas, was forgotten until the early eighteenth century, when workmen, digging a well, uncovered some marble statues. An Austrian officer—for Naples at the time was under the control of Austria—took over, and excavators began digging shafts through the thick crust.
    The explorations, which continued when Naples passed into Bourbon hands, were extremely crude, less an archaeological investigation than a prolonged smash-and-grab. The official in charge for more than a decade was a Spanish army engineer, Roque Joaquin de Alcubierre, who seemed to treat the site as an ossified garbage dump in which loot had unaccountably been buried. (“This man,” 9 remarked a contemporary, dismayed at the wanton damage, “knew as much of antiquities as the moon does of lobsters.”) The diggers burrowed away in search of statues, gems, precious marbles, and other more or less familiar treasures, which they found in abundance and delivered in jumbled heaps to their royal masters.
    In 1750, under a new director, the explorers became somewhat more careful about what they were doing. Three years later, tunneling through the remains of one of the villas, they came across something baffling: the ruins of a room graced with a mosaic floor and filled with innumerable objects “about half a palm long, 10 and round,” as one of them wrote, “which appeared like roots of wood, all black, and seeming to be only of one piece.” At first they thought they had come on a cache of charcoal briquettes, some of which they burned to dissipate the early morning chill. Others thought that the peculiar fragments might have been rolls of burned cloth or fishing nets. Then one of these objects, chancing to fall on the ground, broke open. The unexpected sight of letters inside what had looked like a charred root made the explorers realize what they were looking at: books. They had stumbled on the remains of a private library.
    The volumes that Romans piled up in their libraries were smaller than most modern books: they were for the most part written on scrolls of papyrus. 11 (The word “volume” comes from
volumen
, the Latin word for a thing that is rolled or wound up.) Rolls of papyrus—the plant from which we get our word “paper”—were produced from tall reeds that grew in the marshy delta region of the Nile in Lower Egypt. The reeds were harvested; their stalks cut open and sliced into very thin strips. The strips were laid side by side, slightly overlapping one another; another layer was placed on top, at right angles to the one below; and then the sheet was gently pounded with a mallet. The natural sap that was released allowed the fibers to adhere smoothly to each other, and the individual sheets were then glued into rolls. (The first sheet, on which the contents of the roll could be noted, was called in Greek the
protokollon
, literally, “first glued”—the origin of our word “protocol.”) Wooden sticks, attached to one or both of the ends of the roll and slightly projecting from the top and bottom edges, made it easier to scroll through as one read along: to read a book in the ancient world was to unwind it. The Romans called such a stick the
umbilicus
, and to read a book cover-to-cover was “to unroll to the umbilicus.”
    At first white and flexible, the papyrus would over time gradually get brittle and discolored—nothing lasts forever—but it was lightweight, convenient, relatively inexpensive, and surprisingly durable. Small landowners in Egypt had long realized that they could write their tax receipts on a scrap of papyrus and be reasonably confident that the record would be perfectly legible for years and even generations to come. Priests could use this medium to record the precise language for supplicating the gods;