 |
| Photo courtesy University of Kentucky |
Mount Vesuvius
erupted in 79 AD destroying the wealthy Roman resort town of Herculaneum along
with the better known Pompeii. Beginning in 1738 Charles of Bourbon (Charles III of Spain) sent archaeological teams to Pompeii and Herculaneum to dig up artifacts after Roman items were discovered by well diggers and treasure hunters. In 1752, the team discovered their first scroll
and in 1754 they had discovered an entire library of scrolls inside the ancient villa. They
uncovered roughly 800 charred scrolls from the library now called "Villa
de Papyri" under more than 50 feet (15 meters) of ash.
As soon as the scrolls were discovered
people wanted to know what was written on them. Over the
centuries, various techniques were devised to unroll the scrolls, but they
usually ended up destroying the brittle papyrus. Historians have tried many methods for reading the damaged scrolls. "They
poured mercury on them, they soaked them in rosewater — all kinds of crazy
stuff," said Jennifer Sheridan Moss, a papyrologist at Wayne State
University in Detroit. Even the most careful unrolling can lead to their destruction. A clever unrolling machine designed by
a monk in the 1700s, was fairly successful, but most wound up damaging the fragile
documents.
Of the 1,814 scrolls unearthed, around
300 have been deciphered. From those scrolls historians determined that the library was filled
mainly with writings on Epicurean philosophy with a large collection of works from a
prolific writer named Philodemus.
 | ||||
| Photo courtesy Salvatore Laporta/AP |
Conventional x-rays of the rolled-up
Herculaneum scrolls don't reveal anything because the Herculaneum scrolls
presented a unique challenge: papyrus was burnt and the
text was written with black, carbon-based ink. Common X-ray techniques could not detect the pattern variations between the ink and the papyrus,
so researchers tried an x-ray technique which reads the text through the
rolled-up papyrus by discerning charcoal ink from charred papyrus.
This new approach, called X-ray
phase-contrast tomography (XPCT), builds a higher-definition image by detecting
the slight relief between the letters and the papyrus. The letters rise just
one hundred microns above the papyrus, but that’s enough to build a clearer
picture than any other technique. Similar to a medical CT scan, the new process
produced a three-dimensional view of the folded, compressed interior of the
charred scroll. Unlike regular x-rays, the method can distinguish the charcoal
ink from the surface of the charred papyrus.
The scrolls’ small sizes and
numerous folds make it difficult to focus on every letter or gauge the letter’s
orientation. But what’s important is that researchers proved that you could peek
inside these ancient scrolls without destroying them.
 |
| Image by Vito Mocella/ Nature Communications |
It is going to be a while before the
scrolls are completely interpreted. However, researchers’ new technique is an
encouraging start. Using XPCT,
researchers examined two scrolls and could clearly see letters that formed
short phrases such as “would fall” or “to deny,” but not much more. Daniel Delattre of the Institute for
the Research and History of Texts in Paris examined the handwriting of the few
letters and words that the team was able to recover. He compared the handwriting to that in other Herculaneum scrolls,
and found a match with a scribe writing in the first century bc.
Given that scribe’s activity in other scrolls, the new text is likely
to be a copy of writing by the philosopher and poet Philodemus.
 | |
| Villa de Papyri |
Long ago archaeologists gave up on
opening the texts to spare the culturally important artifacts, but this
imaging technique allows researchers to see what’s written inside, without ever
opening the delicate artifacts. The researchers hope that the
method leads to a non-destructive way to investigate more of Herculaneum's
charred papyri, which in turn will reopen consideration of more excavations at
the Villa de Papyri.
Scholars have long pondered the possibility of another
library buried deeper beneath its ruins because most Roman libraries held
the Greek treatises in one section and Latin books in another. If they do find the hidden library, this new
technique could become very useful.
.jpg)
