At the University of California, Berkeley, researchers have developed a new technical method for reading scrolls buried after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago. High temperatures turned them into fragile charred rolls: trying to unroll such a scroll could destroy it. Now it is possible to look inside without damaging the text.
The key is lead, which was contained in some ancient inks. On X-ray images, it helps distinguish the text from the papyrus. The method was tested on a mock scroll: it was written with lead-based ink, charred, and scanned. Tomography and computer reconstruction made it possible to recover individual elements of the text even with only a minimal amount of lead.
The potential scale of the discovery is enormous: this new approach could help open an entire lost library of the ancient world — hundreds of scrolls with unknown Greek and Roman texts.
