Higher scientific journalist
The poorly burned scroll from the Roman city of Herculaneum is digitally “neopaki”, providing first glances from within 2,000 years.
The document, which looks like a lump of coal, has extinguished the Mount Vesuvius volcanic eruption in 79ad and is too brittle to ever open physically.
But now scientists have used a combination of X -ray recording and artificial intelligence to almost reject it, discovering rows and columns of text.
It takes more work to make the scroll completely readable to decipher its contents, but the team behind the project says that the results are very promising.
“We are convinced that we will be fully able to read the whole scroll, and it is the first time we really managed to say it with great confidence,” said Stephen Parsons, the project leadership for Vesuvius Challenge, an international competition that he tries to unlock the herculaneum scrolls.
Some letters are already clearly visible in the ancient text, and the team believes that it is a work of philosophy.
Hundreds of carbonized scrolls were discovered in Herculaneum, who, like neighbors of Pompey, were buried under the meters of volcanic ash.
In the past, some documents, made of thick paper -like paper called a papyrus, are appreciated, but have collapsed into pieces.
The Bodleian University of Oxford holds several scrolls. He thought they were illegible, they had left them intact for decades.
“We have never been convinced before any of the techniques would be safe enough or effective enough to get any information from the scrolls,” explained Nicole Gilroy, head of book conservation.
But the promise of the Hi-Tech solution encouraged the team to draw one of the precious storage scrolls.
It is located in a specially made case and taken to a diamond light source in Oxfordshire.
Within this huge machine, called syncotrone, the electrons accelerate to almost the speed of light to create a powerful X -ray air that can examine a scroll without damage.
“This can see things on a scale of several thousand millimeters,” explained Adrian Mancuso, director of physical sciences in Diamond.
The scan is used to create 3D reconstruction and then layers inside the coil – contain about 10 m of papyrus – must be identified.
“We need to determine which layer is different from the next layer so we can digitally unwind it,” said Dr. Mancuso.
After this artificial intelligence, it is used to detect ink. It is easier to say than to do – both papyrus and ink are made of carbon and are almost no different from each other.
So, hunting for the smallest signals that ink could be there, and then this ink was colored on digital, revealing the letters to the light.
“We can say that the whole scroll is full of text,” Stephen Parsons said.
“We can now work to appear more clearly. We will move from a handful of words to really significant passages.”
Last year, Tim Vesuv managed to read about 5% of another Herculaneum scroll.
His subject was Greek Epicurean philosophy, which teaches that fulfillment can be found through the satisfaction of everyday things.
Bodleian’s scroll is likely to be on the same topic – but the Vranzavian team calls for more human and computer ingenuity to see if this is the case.
For Nicole Gilroy, work provides a relationship to the past.
“I simply love that connection with the one who collected them, who wrote them, who overturned these scrolls and put them on the shelves. There is a real human aspect that I just think is really precious,” she said.
