First glimpse inside the burnt scroll after 2,000 years

A badly burnt scroll from the Roman city of Harkulanum is digitally “unwritten”, which provides the first look for 2,000 years.

The document, which looks like a lump of charcoal, was given by a volcanic explosion of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD and is very critical to be physically opened anytime.

But now scientists have used a combination of X-ray imaging and artificial intelligence, which reveals rows and columns of text, to completely unfit it.

To understand its content, scroll requires more work to make the scroll completely well, but the team behind the project says the results are very promising.

Project lead Stephen Parsons for the Vesuvius Challenge said, “We are confident that we will be able to read the scroll completely completely, and this is the first time we have been able to say with high confidence.” An international competition that tries to unlock Herkulanum scroll.

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

Hundreds of carbonated scrolls were discovered in the Herkulanium, which was buried under the volcanic ash meter like its neighbor Pompei.

In the past, some documents, which are made of a thick paper -like material, were kept open, called papirus, but they fell into pieces.

The Bodalian Library of the University of Oxford has several scrolls. It is considered unpart upon, they were left untouched for decades.

Nicole Gilroy, head of Book Conservation, said, “We have never been convinced that any technology will be safe or effective to get any information from scroll.”

But the promise of a high-tech solution motivated the team to get one of the precious scroll out of storage.

It was placed in a specially made case and was taken to the diamond light source in Oxfordshire.

Inside this huge machine, called a synchrotron, electrons are almost accelerated into light speed to produce a powerful X-ray beam that can check the scroll without damaging it.

Adrian Mankuso, director of Physical Sciences in Diamond, said, “It can see things on a few thousandth part of one millimeter.”

The scan is used to create 3D reconstruction, then layers inside the scroll – it contains about 10 meters of papirus – is identified.

“We have to do the job of which layer is different from the next layer, so we can uncut that digitally,” Dr. Mankoso said.

Artificial intelligence is then used to detect ink. It is easy that it has been made – both papirus and ink are made of carbon and they are almost uninterrupted to each other.

So the AI ​​hunts for the most small signs that ink may occur, so this ink is painted digitally, bringing the letters to light.

“We can tell that the entire scroll is full of text,” said Stephen Parsons.

“Now we can work to show it more clearly. We are going to a really enough route from a handful of words.”

Last year, a Vesuvius Challenge team managed to read about 5% about one and Hercuulum scroll.

Its theme was Greek Epicurian philosophy, which teaches that fulfillment can be found through the pleasure of everyday things.

The scroll of Bodalian is likely to be on the same subject – but the Vesuvius team is calling for more human and computing simplicity to see if it is the case.

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

“I only love the relationship that also collected to him, who also wrote them, whoever rolled the scroll and put them on the shelves. For this there is a real human aspect that I think I think is really precious, ” He said.