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Scientists May Read Ancient Scrolls Using X-Rays and AI
Confirmed
In Short: To investigate how lead in ancient ink might help in reading these scrolls, a team of scientists created and burned their own replicas.
The scrolls, part of the only known intact library from antiquity, were carbonized by the intense heat of the eruption, making them extremely fragile.
To investigate how lead in ancient ink might help in reading these scrolls, a team of scientists created and burned their own replicas.
These replicas were carbonized in a high-temperature furnace to mimic the damage caused by the eruption, which buried the scrolls under 65 to 70 feet of rock and ash.
X-rays can distinguish lead from papyrus more easily, potentially revealing writing inside the damaged scrolls.
Using an inexpensive handheld X-ray fluorescence scanner, the team can easily identify scrolls with leaded ink, which would be more easily deciphered.
These attempts, which began in 1752, mostly produced heaps of ashes, leading Italian authorities to halt such efforts.
The goal is to read the text on carbonized scrolls without unrolling them, which would reduce them to black dust.
Researchers have previously discovered leaded ink in two Herculaneum scroll fragments, but a thorough search has not been conducted.
With lead in the ink, researchers hope to get a clearer signal to map the letters more accurately.
The caveat is that all of the library’s ancient scrolls are completely carbonized, making them difficult to read due to the low contrast of carbon ink on carbon paper.
What this adds
The new method could potentially unlock the contents of more than 1,800 scrolls and fragments from the library.
What's confirmed
- Lead in ancient ink could help researchers read the Herculaneum papyri, Roman scrolls buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE.
- “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,” Seiler said.
What's still developing
- Recent work combining artificial intelligence with X-ray tomography has allowed researchers to virtually unroll some scrolls and read portions of their text.
- Ash and rock covered the town near modern Naples, Italy, along with a large library of papyrus scrolls.
- Though no one has systematically looked for leaded ink in the scrolls, at least one researcher found lead in the ink of a fragment that remained from earlier efforts to physically unroll some of them.
- UC Berkeley scientists teamed up to create and burn their own scrolls to test a new way to decipher them.
- The procedure replicated what happened to more than a thousand papyrus scrolls in a library in the Italian city of Herculaneum, when ash from Mount Vesuvius inundated the city in 79 C.E.
- A team of scientists has proposed a new approach to reading the famous Herculaneum scrolls: 2,000-year-old texts that are impossible to unroll because Mount Vesuvius burnt them to a crisp in 79 BCE.
- “As you unroll it, you can map the letters a lot more clearly.” When Mount Vesuvius erupted, it both triggered the most infamous ancient tragedy and, in Herculaneum, preserved today’s only known intact library from antiquity.