Researchers have succeeded at unlocking the content of several carbonized papyrus scrolls found at an excavated library that was destroyed by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.
The said volcano destroyed the villa that housed the library in Herculaneum, and also leveled neighboring Pompeii. Scientists have now succeeded at reading the content of some of the charred scrolls using a laser technology called the X-ray phase-contrast tomography.
“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.”
Although hot lava overtook and destroyed nearby Pompeii, a combination of superhot gases and ash overwhelmed Herculaneum, almost destroying the library and villa that was believed to belong to Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus’s family, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar.
The papyrus scrolls in the library became carbonized and charred, and any attempt to unroll the scrolls in order to read the distorted content ended up destroying the scrolls. About 300 scrolls were excavated from the ruins in 1752.
“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.
Due to the risks of destroying the rolled scrolls and losing the content they contain forever, the researchers left off trying to analyze the information contained within the scrolls since their discovery in 1752 – until Vito Mocella, of the Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems in Naples, Italy, led a group of researchers to develop a laser technology for reading the content – without unrolling the scrolls.
Using the laser-like beam of X-rays from the European Synchrotron in Grenoble, France, they were able to pick up the very slight contrast between the carbonized papyrus fibers and the ancient ink, soot-based and also made of carbon.
“This is absolutely a major step forward,” said one Dr. Seales of the Mocella report. “These guys are focused on showing the imagery with best contrast. But to really read the papyrus, you need to untangle its surface, which is the active area of my work.”
The Mocella team’s method visualizes letters free floating inside the scroll, but each letter will need to be assigned to its correct place on Dr. Seales’s surface before the letters can form words. The words “would fall” and “would say”were made out from one of the unrolled scroll fragments dubbed “PHerc.Paris. 1”with letters 2-3 millimeters in size.
The distorted and twisted layers of the rolled-up papyrus revealed the words: alpha, nu, eta, epsilon, and others in the papyrus called “PHerc.Paris. 4”. And also, the letters of the “PHerc.Paris. 4” scroll contain a decorative writing style that was similar to the “PHerc. 1471” scroll containing texts written by Epicurean philosopher Philodemus.
“For a scholar, it would be wonderful to have a manuscript of Virgil written in his lifetime, because what we have are medieval manuscripts which have suffered many changes at the hands of copyists,” said David Sider, a professor of classics at New York University.