X-Rays may reveal ancient secrets in charred scrolls of Pompeii

Ancient scrolls, completely covered in blazing-hot volcanic material, are displayed at the Naples' National Library, Italy, Jan. 20, 2015. Scientists have succeeded in reading parts of an ancient scroll that was buried in a volcanic eruption almost 2,000 years ago, holding out the promise that the world's oldest surviving library may one day reveal all of its secrets.(Photo: Salvatore Laporta, AP)Ancient scrolls fused into brittle sticks of charcoal by the volcano that destroyed Pompeii can now be read thanks to a sophisticated form of X-ray scan, scientists have announced.The technique may make it feasible to decipher the text inside hundreds of rolled-up scrolls, which form a large part of the only surviving library from classical times. Until now scholars had thought it impossible to peer inside the so-called Herculaneum scrolls, which were carbonized by hot gases from Mount Vesuvius almost 2,000 years ago, without destroying them.Unrolled scrolls, which are made of papyrus and can measure 50 feet long, would almost certainly disintegrate if opened.The method "is a huge breakthrough," says Brigham Young University classics scholar Roger Macfarlane of Brigham Young University, who has applied high-tech imaging techniques to fragments of scroll. "If they could get 20 percent, 30 percent of content, that would be fantastic."Two millennia ago, Herculaneum was a swanky resort town surrounded by lavish estates. All its glories were entombed in an instant after Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, unleashing a lethal cloud of superheated gas and ash that vaporized every human in the town.The 600-degree blast also incinerated a collection of perhaps thousands of scrolls in the grand "Villa of the Papyri." When explorers found the library in the 1700s, some scrolls were so unrecognizable – resembling "charcoal briquettes," Macfarlane says – that they were discarded or burned as fuel.Since then, researchers have devised a variety of methods to extract the secrets of the papyri. Some were hacked apart, some painted with a gluey mixture in a method that led them to explode into thousands of fragments.Such techniques, though destructive, have allowed scholars a peek into some of the scrolls, where they've found works by a philosopher-poet named Philodemus. But hundreds, if not thousands, of full scrolls and bits of scroll remained impenetrable.Now a team led by physicist Vito Mocella of the Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems of Italy's National Research Council has read letters inside an unrolled scroll. The researchers created a special cradle for a scroll and inserted it into a huge apparatus that shot beams of X-rays at it, they report in this week's edition of Nature Communications.Changes in the x-rays that travel through the scroll distinguish between plain papyrus and inked letters, which are slightly higher than the surface of the scroll itself.The painstaking analysis required to translate x-rays to letters does not allow the scroll to be read straight off. But it did reveal a number of Greek letters – Greek was the language of philosophy at the time, Mocella says – swimming atop the wrinkled, blackened papyrus.The style of handwriting shows the scroll was written between roughly 25 to 50 BCE. That may mean that the scroll is another writing by Philodemus, whose works dominate other Villa of the Papyri scrolls from the same time frame.Macfarlane thinks some of the unread scrolls could contain Latin works rather than just more Greek. In any case, Mocella says, the scrolls are "a very important source of information. Hardly any of these books are known to us."The technique may hasten further excavation at the Villa of the Papyri, where many scrolls are likely still buried, says computer scientist Brent Seales of the University of Kentucky. The method may also be useful for reading other documents such as extremely fragile Dead Sea Scrolls, Seales says.He's working on a computerized method to stitch together the isolated letters and words recovered by Mocella's scans into a coherent text. Sometime next year, he says, he hopes to provide a full text that would shed more light on the author and content of the scroll.The technique for reading inside the ancient scroll is tedious, Seales allows. All the same, "prior to this discovery, there wasn't a known method for extracting any more information from this material. Now there is."Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah dead at 90Jan 23, 2015