Unlocking the scrolls of Herculaneum

[kennyc]

Definitely not ebooks, but using technology to perhaps read them.

Unlocking the scrolls of Herculaneum
By Robin Banerji
BBC News Magazine
Scroll from villa of the papyri, held in Paris

The British Museum's 2013 show of artefacts from the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, buried in ash during an explosive eruption of Mount Vesuvius, was a sell-out. But could even greater treasures - including lost works of classical literature - still lie underground?

For centuries scholars have been hunting for the lost works of ancient Greek and Latin literature. In the Renaissance, books were found in monastic libraries. In the late 19th Century papyrus scrolls were found in the sands of Egypt. But only in Herculaneum in southern Italy has an entire library from the ancient Mediterranean been discovered in situ.

On the eve of the catastrophe in 79 AD, Herculaneum was a chic resort town on the Bay of Naples, where many of Rome's top families went to rest and recuperate during the hot Italian summers.
.....
A blast of furnace-like gas from the volcano at 400C (752F) carbonised the papyrus scrolls, before the town was buried in a fine volcanic ash which later cooled and solidified into rock.

When excavators and treasure hunters set about exploring the villa in the 18th Century, they mistook the scrolls for lumps of charcoal and burnt logs. Some were used as torches or thrown on to the fire.

Papyrus
But once it was realised what they were - possibly because of the umbilicus, the stick at the centre of the scrolls - the challenge was to find a way to open them.

Some scrolls were simply hacked apart with a butcher's knife - with predictable and lamentable results.
....
So what has been found? Lost poems by Sappho, the 100-plus lost plays of Sophocles, the lost dialogues of Aristotle? Not quite.

Despite being found in Italy, most of the recovered material is in Greek. Perhaps the major discovery is a third of On Nature, a previously lost work by the philosopher Epicurus.
....

Full article here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25106956

[pdurrant]

Yes, the Herculaneum scrolls are a tantalising treasure. I'm sorry to hear that the CT scan of the scrolls hasn't enabled them to be read. I wonder in an NMR scan would produce a better result? But perhaps there isn't enough hydrogen left in them, or perhaps the rsultion isn't good enough with an NMR scan.

Unrolling them does seem too destructive to continue with.

[tubemonkey]

When all else fails, get a bigger hammer

[Billi]

Interesting! Thanks for sharing.

[fjtorres]

Hopefully they'll preserve them until technology improves.
Which it will.

[Lemurion]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Hopefully they'll preserve them until technology improves.
Which it will.

I expect they'll have it figured out within another 10-20 years.

[Barcey]

Copyright must be extended to protect against these types of scenarios. I'm going to start lobbying for life plus 2,005 years.

Thanks for posting though, it's interesting.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

I expect they'll have it figured out within another 10-20 years.

I hope its closer to 10 than 20.
I also hope they find some candidate scrolls in the deepwater shipwrecks being uncovered lately. A few sealed amphoras worth of scrolls would provide added incentive to improve the tech.
I'm an optimist.
http://www.geekosystem.com/sealed-fo...ers-shipwreck/

[Lemurion]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

I hope its closer to 10 than 20.
I also hope they find some candidate scrolls in the deepwater shipwrecks being uncovered lately. A few sealed amphoras worth of scrolls would provide added incentive to improve the tech.
I'm an optimist.
http://www.geekosystem.com/sealed-fo...ers-shipwreck/

I do too, and if they do it right it could lead to a completely new vision of the classical era. We know only enough to know how little we do know. If this works, we could end up easily tripling our awareness of classical literature before 2030.

[crich70]

Interesting. I hadn't known that they had found scrolls at Herculaneum. I've heard of how it gives a look at what cities back then were like, and about how they were able to use the compacted ash to create molds of the victim's features but not that ancient writings had been found. A shame they are in such bad condition due to the heat.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

I do too, and if they do it right it could lead to a completely new vision of the classical era. We know only enough to know how little we do know. If this works, we could end up easily tripling our awareness of classical literature before 2030.

Not to mention that some of the books believed lost since the Library of Alexandria was destroyed might be restored to us.
That would be great.

[QuantumIguana]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Hopefully they'll preserve them until technology improves.
Which it will.

It probably is best to leave them be until we have better technology to read them. No sense in damaging them when we probably will have the technology to read them at some point in the future. Still, waiting is unpleasant.

[Jeff L]

"We were able to unwrap a number of sections from the scroll and flatten them ... Seales ... has also begun testing a new way of reading the scrolls, using a beam from a particle accelerator."


If you can flatten the scroll, you may be able to read the ink, provided you know the chemistry used.

A particle accelerator beam (or rather synchrotron radiation from the particle beam) can be tuned to excite the electrons in the shell of specific atoms (such as those in the ink), raising them to higher energy states or having them leave altogether.

When an electron in a higher state drops to fill the vacated opening below, it emits a photon of the precise different between the higher and lower states. Detectors tuned to this wavelength can catch the photons and reconstruct the original structure.

See:
http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/tip/20...archimedes.htm

[crich70]

Originally Posted by Jeff L

"We were able to unwrap a number of sections from the scroll and flatten them ... Seales ... has also begun testing a new way of reading the scrolls, using a beam from a particle accelerator."


If you can flatten the scroll, you may be able to read the ink, provided you know the chemistry used.

A particle accelerator beam (or rather synchrotron radiation from the particle beam) can be tuned to excite the electrons in the shell of specific atoms (such as those in the ink), raising them to higher energy states or having them leave altogether.

When an electron in a higher state drops to fill the vacated opening below, it emits a photon of the precise different between the higher and lower states. Detectors tuned to this wavelength can catch the photons and reconstruct the original structure.

See:
http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/tip/20...archimedes.htm

So if I understand your posting it improves the contrast between the papyrus and the ink and by so doing it enables it to be read by the eye. Neat.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by crich70

So if I understand your posting it improves the contrast between the papyrus and the ink and by so doing it enables it to be read by the eye. Neat.

Since the scrolls are so fragile, any reading method that involves unrolling them (actually breaking bits off them) is destructive. It's why the CT scan was such a good idea. Such a shame it hasn't worked.

I hope someone comes up with a way to read them without physically unrolling them.