Secrets hidden in ancient scrolls buried almost 2,000 years ago by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius may finally be revealed thanks to a new X-ray technique, researchers say.
Using X-ray tomography, a technique borrowed from the medical field, may allow the scrolls buried in ash by the A.D. 79 eruption of Vesuvius to be read without having to unroll the charred, fragile documents, they say.
The scrolls were discovered in the 18th century in the seaside town of Herculaneum, which was buried in the same ash that killed thousands of people in nearby Pompeii when Vesuvius erupted.
In 1752 workers found nearly 2,000 papyrus scrolls, charred by the heat of the ancient catastrophe, in a library of a villa believed to have been the home of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar.
While some could be unrolled and read, most were too fragile for that to be attempted, and have kept their secrets hidden for centuries.
Now X-rays may allow scientists to peer inside the scrolls, many of which look like nothing more than long clubs of charcoal.
"Anybody who focuses on the ancient world is always going to be excited to get even one paragraph, one chapter, more," says Roger Macfarlane, a classicist at Brigham Young University in Utah. "The prospect of getting hundreds of books more is staggering."
Researchers, writing in the journal Nature Communications, report success using a technique called X-ray phase-contrast tomography to peer into the blackened scrolls.
Because the letters written in ink on the papyrus of the scrolls are raised slightly in height above the scrolls' surface, X-ray waves reflecting off the lettering will have a slightly different phase than those reflecting off the papyrus itself.
The phase difference has allowed a research team led by Vito Mocella, of the Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems in Naples, Italy, to reproduce the shape of the lettering hidden inside the rolled scrolls.
"At least we know there are techniques able to read inside the papyri, finally," says Mocella.
The technique has piqued the interest of classical scholars, who see it as a way to uncover additional lost works of Greek and Latin literature.
The villa in Herculaneum probably contained a large library of wide-ranging works, many of which may still exist in portions of the building yet to be excavated, they say.
"It would have been odd for a villa of this sort not to have had a major library," says Richard Janko of the University of Michigan, who has translated some of the few scrolls readable to this point. "So this technology, when perfected, does open the way to rediscovering a lot more ancient literature."
