In his home lab, Douglas Seiler put a roll of papyrus that students had written on inside a steel container and heated it in a furnace until it charred. On the papyrus, high school students had written passages from Star Wars and the Bible with reed pens. Seiler was trying to destroy something on purpose, so he could learn how to read what a volcanic eruption had nearly destroyed 2,000 years earlier.
Seiler, a retired inventor who had worked in real estate and banking, was recreating a problem that has frustrated scholars for centuries. When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 C.E., it buried a library in the nearby town of Herculaneum, turning its papyrus books into fragile, carbonized rolls. Attempts to open them sometimes destroyed the very writing people hoped to recover.
In a study published in PLOS One, Seiler and his collaborators used X-rays and software to read portions of a homemade, charred scroll without opening it. Lead added to the test ink made the lettering easier to see. Earlier research has found lead in some ancient Herculaneum ink, too, so the team proposes checking unopened scrolls for the metal to identify those whose lost texts might be easier to recover.
Explore All Options“Almost everything from antiquity has been destroyed,” Seiler said in a press release. “There's very little left except papyrus that was in a dry climate or some works that were copied by scribes and transferred down. But some of the Herculaneum scrolls aren't copies. These are books directly from the ancient world frozen in time. They’re actually from Roman intellectual circles.”
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Why the Herculaneum Scrolls Are So Hard to Read
Recovered texts include previously unknown writings by the philosopher Philodemus. X-rays and AI have helped read portions of some Herculaneum scrolls, but both the ink and the charred papyrus are made mostly of carbon. They look so similar in scans that traces of writing can be difficult to distinguish.
Reading a Homemade Scroll Without Opening It
Virtually unwrapped scroll
(Image Credit: Douglas Seiler, Jacob LaManna, Michael Cyrus Daugherty, et al)
Seiler funded the research himself, working with chemists to prepare inks containing different amounts of lead. On flat fragments of charred test papyrus, letters written without lead were invisible in X-ray images, while those containing lead could be seen.
Physicist Jacob LaManna at the National Institute of Standards and Technology then scanned a charred test scroll to create a 3D image of its tightly rolled layers.
His colleague Michael Cyrus Daugherty adapted software originally developed to examine the rolled layers inside lithium-ion batteries. He adjusted the program to follow the uneven papyrus and digitally flatten its layers, allowing some of the handwriting to become readable. Among the words they could make out were “the children of.”
Finding More Words From the Ancient World
A separate handheld scanner detected lead in the charred test scroll, supporting the proposed screening step. Researchers still need to develop a way to check ancient scrolls and test whether those containing lead have writing they can recover.
The homemade scrolls could also help improve reading software without risking ancient manuscripts. Developers could compare a program’s reconstruction with the words the students actually wrote before the papyrus was charred.
The hope is to recover words that may survive nowhere else, preserved in the handwriting of people who lived some 2,000 years ago. Leah Packard-Grams, a UC Berkeley papyrus specialist who helped check the team’s test inks, knows that sense of connection from her work translating ancient papyri preserved in Egypt.
“This is what drew me to papyrology — that I could read the words of ancient people not through a library book or through a Renaissance copy but actually sit down and know that someone wrote this letter to whomever, his father or something,” she said. “It's autograph history — not just from a book, but from what they were actually writing.”
Read More: Ash Cloud From Mt. Vesuvius Turned One Victim's Brain to Glass
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
- This article references information from a study published in PLOS One: A model carbonized papyrus scroll opens a novel path to identifying readable scrolls of the Herculaneum Library
