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| An ancient scroll being scanned. Image courtesy University of Kentucky |
Scientists are proving you can judge a “book” without ever cracking open the cover.
And by book, we mean a 2,000-year-old scroll buried after the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.
Over 260 years ago, archaeologists discovered hundreds of ancient
scrolls left behind in an ancient library in Herculaneum, which was
covered in volcanic material after the infamous eruption in 79 A.D.
Unfortunately, these charred scrolls are next to impossible to open
without destroying them, leaving their contents largely a mystery. But a
new imaging technique allows researchers to see what’s written inside,
without ever opening the delicate artifacts.
If At First You Don’t Succeed, You Should Stop
In the 18th Century, Charles the Bourbon King of Naples
sent an archeological team to Pompeii and Herculaneum to dig up
artifacts after scattered discoveries by well diggers and treasure
hunters. In 1752, this team discovered their first scrolls, and by 1754
they had discovered an entire library filled with scrolls inside an
ancient villa.
Finding the scrolls was well and good, but, of course, people wanted
to know what was written. Over the centuries, various techniques were
devised to unroll the scrolls, but they usually ended up destroying the
brittle papyrus. So, archaeologists gave up on opening the texts to
spare the culturally important artifacts. That is, until now.
A New Technique
For years, researchers have used X-ray technology to get a deeper
look at anything from molecules to ancient tombs. Basically, you blast
an object with X-rays, and different elements in the object reflect
those X-ray beams back at different patterns. However, the Herculaneum
scrolls presented a unique challenge: The scrolls were scorched and
sealed, and the text was written with black, carbon-based ink. The
current X-ray techniques weren’t enough detect the pattern variations
between the ink and the papyrus, so researchers tried something new.
Their 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.
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| Letters visualized inside the scroll. Image by Vito Mocella/ Nature Communications |
What’s Inside?
We’re sorry, but it’s still 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.
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. They published their findings this week in the journal Nature Communications.
Researchers have their work cut out for them if they want to get a
complete read on the rest of the scrolls, but at least they have the
right tool to do it.
Source : discovermagazine.com
