Major Breakthrough in Unlocking the Secrets of Ancient Herculaneum Scrolls

Researchers may have made a breakthrough when it comes to unlocking the secrets of ancient Herculaneum scrolls. Although the scrolls cannot physically be opened, scientists have now created software that will visualize the scrolls' writings as they would be if unrolled after scanning them.

The scrolls in question may well be the only remaining copies as of yet unknown literature from the classical era. Each scrolls is 20 to 30 feet long, and each contains about 3,000 words each. Estimated to be about 2,000 years old and made of papyrus, these scrolls were carbonized in the Mount Vesuvius volcanic eruption; they were later discovered as charred clumps in the Villa of the Papyri in the ancient Italian city of Herculaneum beginning in 1752. Yet if anyone attempted to open them, the artifacts would often shatter beyond repair.

Now, though, researchers have a way to potentially read the scrolls. They applied an X-ray method to the scrolls that's often used in the medical and archaeology communities to detect the ink within them. Called "propagation-based phase contrast imaging," the technique allows the scientists to see letters and, in a few instances, whole words.

Now that the researchers can see the writings, the next step is to organize them. Without unrolling the scrolls, new software will run extremely high-resolution images from the tangled surfaces to make sense of the jumbled letters.

"We have a ton of data from all of our preliminary work, and from the 2009-2010 work," said Brent Seales, one of the researchers, in a news release. "We're using that data to build software so that we can pull out large sections and flatten them. To date, no tool exists that can accomplish that. The software we're building will be the first to visualize data in that way, and it's crucial to uncovering the works inside the Herculaneum scrolls."

Currently, the researchers are working hard to unravel what these scrolls say. In time, we may just see an entire new view of ancient history.

The findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.

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