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Scientists Burn Modern Scrolls to Read Ancient Ones
Confirmed
In Short: Researchers created and charred their own scrolls to test a new method for deciphering carbonized Herculaneum texts.
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a new method to read ancient, carbonized scrolls from Herculaneum, a city buried by volcanic ash in 79 C.E. They created and burned their own scrolls to test the technique.
The scrolls, discovered in 1752, are too fragile to unroll physically. Previous attempts to read them have been hampered by the low contrast between carbon ink and carbonized papyrus.
To address this, the team used X-ray scans and artificial intelligence to virtually unroll the scrolls. They also adapted software originally designed for lithium-ion batteries to digitally unwrap the scrolls.
Douglas Seiler, a retired inventor, noted that lead-based ink could provide a clearer signal for X-ray scans. He and his team burned modern papyrus scrolls to validate a screening method that could identify scrolls written in lead-based ink.
The researchers found that a handheld X-ray fluorescence scanner could easily detect leaded ink in burned scrolls, offering a simple way to identify scrolls that are more easily decipherable.
This new approach could help researchers read more of the 1,800 scrolls and fragments from the library, potentially revealing invaluable insights into ancient texts.
What's confirmed
- “With lead in the ink, you would get a huge friggin’ signature, so you really need to be looking for scrolls with lead in them,” said Douglas Seiler, co-author of the study and a retired inventor.
What's still developing
- In 2026, another team used AI to read part of a damaged scroll called PHerc. 1667.
- Ash and rock covered the town near modern Naples, Italy, along with a large library of papyrus scrolls.
- Extreme heat carbonized the scrolls, leaving fragile blackened objects.
- The Vesuvius Challenge is an ongoing project that combines “digital unwrapping” with crowdsourced machine learning to decipher the so-called Herculaneum scrolls, badly charred 2,000-year-old papyri too fragile to be physically unrolled.
- Brent Seales’ lab at the University of Kentucky has been working on deciphering the Herculaneum scrolls for many years.
- He employs a different method of “virtually unrolling” damaged scrolls, which he used in 2016 to “open” a scroll found on the western shore of the Dead Sea, revealing the first few verses from the book of Leviticus.
- Douglas Seiler, a retired inventor, was working with Berkeley SETI on a new telescope called Panoseti when he heard about the Herculaneum scrolls—as well as the poor signal-to-noise ratios that had been plaguing the efforts of Seales and others to digitally unwrap and decipher them.
- In 2016, scientists identified letters in two fragments of a scroll that contained lead, suggesting that some of the scrolls might be written in lead-based ink.