Scientists Burn Modern Scrolls to Help Read 2,000-Year-Old Texts

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley deliberately burned modern papyrus scrolls to test a new method that could help researchers read ancient texts carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago.

The experiment was designed to imitate the condition of the Herculaneum scrolls. When Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, volcanic material buried a library in Herculaneum and carbonized its papyrus. Many of the surviving scrolls are so fragile that physically opening them would destroy them.

The Berkeley team created modern papyrus scrolls, wrote on them with lampblack ink containing measured amounts of lead, and carbonized them in a low-oxygen environment. Researchers then scanned the burned scrolls with X-ray computed tomography.

The lead made a major difference. According to Berkeley, lead in the ink absorbed as much as 25 times more X-rays than the surrounding carbonized papyrus, allowing letters to stand out far more clearly in the scan. The team also showed that handheld X-ray fluorescence equipment could identify leaded ink before a scroll undergoes more detailed CT scanning.

Roughly 1,800 Herculaneum scrolls and fragments survive in collections in Italy, France and England. Researchers have already used high-resolution scans, virtual unrolling and machine learning to recover text from some of them. The new work suggests that scrolls containing even small amounts of lead in their ink may be especially promising candidates for future reading.

The method will not make every carbonized scroll readable. Many ancient inks were carbon-based and may contain little or no lead. But it gives researchers another way to identify scrolls where the hidden writing could produce a much stronger X-ray signal.

Original source: UC Berkeley