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Comment by bglazer | Hacker News Reader

One aspect of archaeology that I really find fascinating is the practice of leaving certain artifacts unexplored. The original discoverers of the scrolls tried to unroll a few, apparently found it was impossible without completely destroying the scroll, and then just left the rest undisturbed. Rather than pushing forward and destroying everything, they left these as a mystery for a future age. Two centuries (!!) later we can finally begin to understand these, with the aid of technology that would be utterly unthinkable to those people who very thoughtfully restrained themselves.

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> Rather than pushing forward and destroying everything

In the early days they wouldn't have accomplished anything by pushing forward, so it doesn't take all that much restraint.

I'm more impressed by people in, say, the 1990s or early 2000s. They might've had a shot but there was still too much risk, so they restrained themselves until it was a safer bet.

Yeah, I can't give the King's men much credit here. They destroyed a lot of scrolls, and it was only because they weren't getting much of anything that they stopped and abandoned excavations or focused on digging out sculptures they could show off (many now in the Getty Museum - great museum, but I did feel a bit melancholy thinking about the scrolls while I was there in 2019).

On the other hand, we ground up mummies for paint to the point that we ran out and used fresher corpses to meet demand.

It is a bit of miracle that they were preserved, and not just discarded.

Where can I read more about this? Frankly I'm a bit surprised that I've never heard about this considering how shocking it sounds.

Wild, isn't it? Hands down my favorite historical fact learned in 2023.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_brown

Wild? Wait until you read about people actually eating mummies and corpses

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/mummy-eat...

Wow. I like aged cheese but that is a bridge too far.

The things Futurama made me look up on Wikipedia...

Worse than that, lots were ground up (and consumed) for medicines.

In one of the Futurama episodes, Fry eats one of Farnsworth's mini mummies and Farnsworth is upset because he wanted to eat it. Fry said it tasted like jerky I think.

One aspect of that time period is they absolutely idolized the romans. A lot of education at the time consisted of learning latin and at the same time people were well aware that only a fraction of the classical texts had been preserved. I find it very believable that they understood the significance of preserving and potentially unlocking these scrolls.

An example of the same thing at a macro level:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologists-reb...

Bigger yet by far https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mausoleum_of_the_First_Qin_Emp...

He of the terracotta army. Not excavated yet for fear of damage, but I would so love to know...

The feeling you get when you’ve gone into one of those aircraft hanger-size buildings and then you see some of the information they’ve gotten with ground tests ( radar, mercury, etc ) is wild. The site is huge.

One of the suppositions is that the main chamber contained a model of his entire kingdom, replete with rivers of mercury.

So yes. Archaeology is a bit destructive, and sometimes the destruction can go both ways. Proceed with caution.

Similarly, there are large sections of Pompeii, which remain unexcavated -- left for the future.

Herculaneum, where these scrolls are from, is 75% unexcavated! And it will likely remain this way for some time, as Naples sits right on top of it.

The town of Ercolano sits on top of it. Of course effectively it’s a suburb of Naples these days

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