Google Maps, Lasers Reveal Vatican Catacombs

Nerval's Lobster writes "The Vatican, while notoriously secretive about things buried in its vaults and archives, is being as public as the digital age allows it to be about the nearly completed restoration of catacombs early Christians used as secret churches as well as burial sites. Contractors, archaeologists and art experts spent the past five years restoring the Priscilla catacombs under the Vatican using lasers, among other techniques, to restore frescoes painted on the walls of the burial chambers. The Vatican unveiled the work Nov. 19 with a press conference in the Basilica of San Silvestro outside the burial tunnels, accompanied by a virtual tour of the Priscilla catacombs provided by Google Maps. The basilica is divided into an area for religious services and another that acts as a deposit for sculptures and artifacts dug up during excavations of the catacombs and other areas underneath the Vatican."

Took the virtual tour, could clearly see graffiti

[volvox_voxel]

I wandered around via the virtual tour, but all the shelves were empty. .. I wonder what happened to the remains? It was curious to read the graffiti of names and dates, and the ancient signs on the wall but wasn't able to recognize all the writing, It looked like their was more than one language used for the official lettering. I saw dates like 1862, 1920, 1952, etc . Graffiti has been a part of human experience for a long time, and is one way historians can estimate how literate the average population was of an ancient civilization.. Did you know that we have access to the words and thoughts of the citizens of Pompeii and Herculaneum?

Re:Took the virtual tour, could clearly see graffi

[giorgist]

The writing you could not decipher was Greek

Re:Took the virtual tour, could clearly see graffi

[cervesaebraciator]

There's nothing particularly Byzantine about that letter that looks like a "C". It's called a lunate sigma [wikipedia.org] and it's been around since the Hellenistic period. And the scripts written in the crypts are not miniscule; they're very decidedly majuscule. One is rather unlikely to find Greek written in miniscule in a 2nd-4th c. Roman catacomb, given that Greek miniscule would not be invented for another five centuries.

Now, if you happen to have a little Greek, you might have come to the conclusion that these scripts must be Byzantine since your Attic Greek textbook uses letters that look quite different. But the fact is that modern printed Greek, whether classical, koine, or Byzantine, uses a post-classical script. With the invention of printing, printers created a miniscule script similar to that found in the Byzantine manuscripts they were using. Unless you're working specifically on paleography, none of your textbooks or printed editions are going to use a classical script.