Most definitely. It was a standard. So it will surely be there, unless it was one of the first baskets the evacuators already got away with.

I’m sorry, Nick, but you are lost in a racist delusion.

Black does not mean “people of subsaharan African descent.” The word black was invented in the Age of Exploration to distinguish all dark-skinned people from white-skinned people to demarcate a system of racial subjugation. This is why W.E.B. Dubois was correct when he said (paraphrasing), “Before the explorations, there were no white people.” The concept of “black” and “white” did not exist. And it was created to demarcate people by color, not by ancestry. That was the point of it. They didn’t have genetic tests back then. They needed to flag slaves by color. Period.

Then, come the Jim Crow era that solidified modern American racism, the “one drop” principle prevailed (invented by racists), and it wasn’t fear of sub-saharan blood, but the blood of any dark skinned person, whether they came from North Africa or not did not matter. And racist behavior (such as segregating schools and drinking fountains and restrooms and even where you were allowed to live) was all decided by color of skin and not “genetic testing” (at all, much less restricted to “sub-saharan ancestry”). Birth certificates might be used to segregate “passing” whites, but even then the sin was not “tracing an ancestry to Sahara” but “having a colored parent.”

Thus, you will find then (and find now) people of very mixed blood being treated as black because of their skin color, not because of what country they descend from. You’ll have dark skinned hispanics classified as and treated as black people, because they “look black.” They don’t have to be the darkest of skin. Any color counts, as long as it visibly distinguishes you.

So, no, “black” is not a reference to specific geographic descendency. And even had it been (contrary to all historical fact), Egyptians were substantially sub-Saharan, and I linked you to scientific studies proving this, e.g. “the paternal lineage of Ramesses III … shows its highest frequencies in modern West African populations (~80%) and Central Africa (~60%)” and this remains the case today, e.g. “the absolute estimates of sub-Saharan African ancestry in the 135 modern Egyptian samples ranged from 14 to 21%.” As much as any person regarded and treated as black in America today.

But, again, no one honestly actually classifies “black” as “sub-saharan,” because no one has the magical ability to read the DNA of anyone they encounter and see and treat as black. Black was invented, and remains, a color designation, not an ethnogenetic one.

You are completely wrong on this – Black refers to people of subsaharan African descent. Please don’t ignore and twist facts to make history conform to your identity politics. The native Egyptians had a Mediterranean middle Eastern look, just as they do now. Genetics, inscriptions, funeral paintings on Egyptian mummys prove this.

If you want to promote black history then write about the Ethiopian kingdom or medieval African kingdoms, don’t project your own ideology onto Egyptian history, stealing and colonising their history to suit your western academic ideology.

Um. You must not be reading the article here you are commenting on: we have already recovered hundreds of scrolls there, and from an area open to the sky even (the rest will be indoors). So obviously they weren’t “incinerated.” They were baked. That’s why we need advanced tech to read them.

I suggest you actually read my article before commenting on it next time.

A new hazard scenario at Vesuvius: deadly thermal impact of detached ash cloud surges in 79CE at Herculaneum.

There won’t likely be many Latin translations because at that time bilingualism was the norm, so Romans just read works in Greek. Translations became more needed in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages as the West lost its bilingual tradition and few people could read Greek anymore.

There could be lost works of Plato and Aristotle (there are many missing from Aristotle, for example). There could also be earlier and thus more reliable manuscripts of books we already have (there are, for example, various textual questions in some of the works of Aristotle that could be answered).

There is no evidence anything that existed was no longer extant in the 1st century. So Herculaneum could have anything written in Latin or Greek from any century prior to 79 A.D. It could possibly even have lost works in Etruscan, which we know were still around. The question is rather probability rather than possibility. Is it likely some particular thing would be there?

Regarding the Epic Cycle, the odds are high at least something we don’t have will be there. Poetry was a required element of any elite’s library, many of those poems were among the most popular or important, and the books we found in the staging area contain works on the philosophy of poetry, which suggests this owner may have especially been interested in building their poetry collection.

More obscure but close to my own heart would be lost works from the Epic Cycle, beyond the Iliad and Odyssey. Were these still extant in the 1st century AD, to your knowledge?

First, “one drop” racial ideology is a product of white supremacist belief systems and hardly warrants heed. Black only means Person of Color of African descent. Not any kind of racial purity (which nowhere exists).

Second, in the Roman period the dominant ethnicity in Egypt was Egyptian; second, no more than 30% of the population, was Greek.

But if Pamphila were a Greek (or Syrian etc.) from Egypt, she would be called that. Instead she is called an Egyptian, which means she was a native Egyptian (whole or in substantial enough part to warrant the description). Especially since she clearly was Greco-Roman by culture (as her literary art entails), and yet wasn’t described as Greek or Roman.

In antiquity Egyptians were substantially of Niger Congo origin, with considerable admixture from Europe and the Middle East. They would be of lighter skin than sub-Saharans, as they are now, but they would qualify as Black by all relevant metrics, from the unofficial (e.g. whether they would be targeted by bigotry as Black in the U.S.) to the official (e.g. whether they would be counted as Black in the U.S. census).

But it is also true that the category “White” and “Black” did not exist until it was invented by White imperialists in the 15th century to establish the modern antebellum slave system (as W.E.B. Dubois said, “Before the Age of Exploration, there were no white people.”).

This is a modern classification, not an ancient one. Anciently, people generally only cared about your culture (and thus, language and education; secondarily, any tribal or political affiliation), not what color your skin was, and would only remark on the latter if it was particularly at the edges of the bell curve (very pale or very black).

Since there was no color-based racism in antiquity, there was no color-based racism in antiquity to overcome (though there were other kinds). But that does not make ancient Egyptians into “Whites” or “Arabs.” They were tawny-skinned Africans. Which in modern parlance means “Black” (all racist and political efforts to deny this notwithstanding).