This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Douglas Seiler painstakingly sourced papyrus and reed pens from Egypt and traditional lampblack ink from Japan, then paid some high school students to inscribe the papyrus with lines from Star Wars and the Bible and a quote from the '60s sci-fi TV show The Outer Limits. Seiler, an affiliate of Berkeley SETI, then rolled up the papyrus, placed it in a container inside a high-temperature furnace and burned it to a crisp.
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 A.D. 79 and turned ancient learning—some likely unknown today—into brittle, carbonized husks. The eruption, which also buried nearby Pompeii, preserved for posterity the only known intact library from antiquity. Seiler's goal was to determine whether it's possible to read the text on carbonized scrolls without unrolling them and reducing them to black dust.
The key, he hypothesized, was that inks containing lead would stand out when a scroll is scanned by an X-ray beam and that computer algorithms could virtually unroll the scroll to reveal the hidden text. In a paper published Sept. 16 in the journal PLOS ONE, Seiler and his collaborators, including several Berkeley experts, report that even minuscule amounts of lead in the ink make the letters readable by X-ray tomography, or X-ray CT. The lead absorbs up to 25 times as many X-rays as the charred papyrus, making the inked letters stand out.
"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. "They're having problems reading a lot of them because of the low contrast of carbon ink on carbon paper. We're relatively certain that if they start searching for lead, or they let us search for lead, it will help this whole process.
This is the Holy Grail." In the paper, the researchers also showed that an inexpensive handheld X-ray fluorescence scanner can easily detect leaded ink in a burned scroll, providing a simple way to identify scrolls that would be more easily deciphered using X-ray CT. To date, only a few charred scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum have been virtually unrolled and read, and none were tested for leaded ink. 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.
Most of those attempts followed the scrolls' discovery in 1752, but when unrolling mostly produced heaps of ashes, the Italian authorities called a halt to such efforts. All of the physically unrolled scrolls have contained texts unknown to scholars, many written by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus, who lived in Herculaneum a century before the Vesuvius eruption. Currently, what remains of the library's 1,800 or so scrolls and scroll fragments is housed in Italy, France and England.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
