Using X-rays, scientists read 2,000 year old scrolls charred by Mount Vesuvius

Mount Vesuvius today

By Amina Khan 
Excerpt from latimes.com

 

Researchers

Daniel Delattre, left, and Emmanuel Brun observe the scroll before

X-ray phase contrast imaging begins. (J. Delattre)

The findings, described in the journal Nature

Communications, give hope to researchers who have until now been unable

to read these delicate scrolls without serious risk of destroying them.

The

scrolls come from a library in Herculaneum, one of several Roman towns

that, along with Pompeii, was destroyed when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in AD

79. This library, a small room in a large villa, held hundreds of

handwritten papyrus scrolls that had been carbonized from a furnace-like

blast of 608-degree-Fahrenheit gas produced by the volcano.

“This

rich book collection, consisting principally of Epicurean philosophical

texts, is a unique cultural treasure, as it is the only ancient library

to survive together with its books,” the study authors wrote. “The

texts preserved in these papyri, now mainly stored in the Officina dei

Papiri in the National Library of Naples, had been unknown to scholars

before the discovery of the Herculaneum library, since they had not been

copied and recopied in late Antiquity, the middle ages and

Renaissance.”

So

researchers have tried every which way to read these rare and valuable

scrolls, which could open a singular window into a lost literary past.

The problem is, these scrolls are so delicate that it’s nearly

impossible to unroll them without harming them. That hasn’t kept other

researchers from trying, however – sometimes successfully, and sometimes

not.

“Different opening techniques, all less effective, have been

tried over the years until the so-called ‘Oslo method’ was applied in

the 1980s on two Herculaneum scrolls now in Paris with problematic

results, since the method required the rolls to be picked apart into

small pieces,” the study authors wrote. (Yikes.)

Any further

attempts to physically open these scrolls were called off since then,

they said, “because an excessive percentage of these ancient texts was

irretrievably lost by the application of such methods.”

This

is where a technique like X-ray computed tomography, which could

penetrate the rolled scrolls, would come in handy. The problem is, the

ancient writers used ink made of carbon pulled from smoke residue. And

because the papyrus had been carbonized from the blazing heat, both

paper and ink are made of roughly the same stuff. Because the soot-based

ink and baked paper have about the same density, until now it’s been

practically impossible to tell ink and paper apart.

But a team led

by Vito Mocella of the Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems

in Naples, Italy, realized they could use a different technique called

X-ray phase-contrast tomography. Unlike the standard X-ray CT scans,

X-ray phase-contrast tomography examines phase shifts in the X-ray light

as it passes through different structures.

Using the technique, the scientists were able to make out a few words and letters from two scrolls, one of them still rolled.

Reading

these scrolls is difficult; computer reconstructions of the rolled

scroll reveal that the blast of volcanic material so damaged its

once-perfect whorls that its cross section looks like a half-melted

tree-ring pattern. The paper inside has been thoroughly warped, and some

of the letters on the paper probably distorted almost beyond

recognition.

Nonetheless,

the researchers were able to read a number of words and letters, which

were about 2 to 3 millimeters in size. On an unrolled fragment of a

scroll called “PHerc.Paris. 1,” they were able to make up the words for

“would fall” and “would say.” In the twisted, distorted layers of the

rolled-up papyrus called “PHerc.Paris. 4,” they could pick out

individual letters: alpha, nu, eta, epsilon and others.

The

letters in “PHerc.Paris. 4” are also written in a distinctive style with

certain decorative flourishes that seemed very similar to a scroll

called “PHerc. 1471,” which holds a text written by the Epicurean

philosopher Philodemus. The researchers think they were written in the

second quarter of the first century BC.

Ultimately, the researchers wrote, this work was a

proofof concept to give other researchers a safe and reliable way to

explore ancient philosophical works that were until now off-limits to

them.

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Using X-rays, scientists read 2,000 year old scrolls charred by Mount Vesuvius