Scrolls count as books, right?
They've managed to find actual words in a two-thousand year-old, burned scrolls from Herculaneum.
The exciting bit? The words they've read so far appear to be from a previously unknown ancient text. And there are over six hundred other scrolls. If we can read more of them, we'll find lost texts. Maybe some we've heard of, maybe some we haven't. Either would be amazing!
From the article:
The Herculaneum papyri, ancient scrolls housed in the library of a private villa near Pompeii, were buried and carbonized by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. For almost 2,000 years, this lone surviving library from antiquity was buried underground under 20 meters of volcanic mud. In the 1700s, they were excavated, and while they were in some ways preserved by the eruption, they were so fragile that they would turn to dust if mishandled. How do you read a scroll you can’t open? For hundreds of years, this question went unanswered.
Tyrian Purple (πορφύρα - porphúra) was an expensive dye used to manufacture 'royal silk' in the pre-Byzantine era: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrian_purple. For a long time, the silk was the most expensive man-made item by weight.
The use of the dye also goes back to ancient Phoenicians (also known as 'land of the purple').
Wonder if these scrolls have anything to do with royal trade?