First glance inside the burned parchment after 2,000 years

A badly burned parchment from the Roman city of Herculano has been digitally “developed”, providing the first glance within 2,000 years.

The document, which looks like a lump of coal, was carbonized by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesubio in 79AD and is too fragile to open physically.

But now scientists have used a combination of X -ray images and artificial intelligence to deploy it practically, revealing rows and text columns.

More work is needed so that the parchment is completely readable to decipher its content, but the team behind the project says that the results are very promising.

“We are sure that we can read practically all the parchment in its entire Herculano scrolls.

Some letters are already clearly visible in the old text and the team believes that it is a work of philosophy.

Hundreds of carbonized scrolls were discovered in Herculano, which like its neighbor Pompeya was buried under meters of volcanic ashes.

In the past, some of the documents, which are made of a thick paper material called papyrus, were appreciated but collapsed in pieces.

The Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford has several of the scrolls. Thought it was illegible, they had left them intact for decades.

“We had never been convinced before any of the techniques would be safe or effective enough to obtain information from the scrolls,” said Nicole Gilroy, director of book conservation.

But the promise of a high -tech solution led the team to obtain one of the beautiful scrolls outside storage.

It was placed in a case especially made and taken to Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire.

Within this huge machine, which is called Syntrotron, the electrons accelerate at almost the speed of light to produce a powerful X -ray beam that can probe the displacement without damaging it.

“You can see things on the scale of a thousands of millimeters,” said Adrian Mancuso, director of Physical Sciences of Diamond.

The scan is used to create a 3D reconstruction, then the layers must be identified within the parchment, contains approximately 10 m of papyrus.

“We have to find out what layer is different from the next layer to be able to unwind that digitally,” said Dr. Mancuso.

After that artificial intelligence it is used to detect ink. It is easier to say it than to do it: both the papyrus and the ink are made of carbon and are almost indistinguishable on each other.

Then, the AI ​​seeks the smallest signals that the ink could be there, so this ink is painted digitally, bringing the letters to light.

“We can say that all the parchment is full of text,” said Stephen Parsons.

“Now we can work so that it appears more clearly. We will move from a handful of words to really substantial passages.”

Last year, a team of Vesuvius Challenge managed to read about 5% of another Herculano scroll.

His theme was Greek epicurean philosophy, which teaches that compliance can be found through the pleasure of everyday things.

It is likely that Bodleian’s parchment is on the same subject, but Vesuvio’s team is asking for more human and computer ingenuity to see if this is the case.

For Nicole Gilroy, work is providing a link to the past.

“I love that connection with who picked them up, who wrote them, who rolled those scrolls and put them on the shelves. There is a true human aspect that I think is really precious,” he said.