Dentists chew over ancient scrolls mystery
Texts damaged by Mount Vesuvius eruption in AD79 may finally be deciphered by dental scan technology
HUNDREDS of papyri scrolls unearthed at the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum have remained unopened since they were burnt, blackened and buried by the devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79. Their ancient texts have been wound tightly inside, unread ever since. Now some of their secrets could be revealed for the first time with the aid of dental technology.
Three of the fragile carbonised scrolls will be transported to America this week from Italy for a major exhibition at the J Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California.
They will first make an unlikely detour – the UCLA School of Dentistry. There, through the adaptation of the latest medical equipment, they will undergo complex, high-resolution scanning. Experts are excited because technological advances could now allow the scrolls to be unravelled in a completely non-invasive way. Through “virtual unwrapping”, hundreds of texts dating from the 2nd century BC to the 1st century AD could be deciphered.
The three scrolls are among hundreds that remain carbonised and closed. More than a thousand were found at Herculaneum, within the Villa dei Papiri, a luxurious seaside residence.
Dr Kenneth Lapatin, the Getty’s curator of antiquities, told The Sunday Telegraph that some of those scrolls had been damaged or destroyed by early attempts to open them following their initial discovery in the 1750s. Those were philosophical treatises and poetry.
He said: “So far, the villa hasn’t yielded the texts that a lot of people want – the lost plays of Sophocles. But the unopened texts could be that… This is the only library with its contents from the Classical world.”
The project is a collaboration between the Getty Museum and the National Library in Naples, which owns the scrolls, and the Digital Restoration Initiative (DRI) run by the University of Kentucky, headed by Professor Brent Seales.
Dr Christy Chapman, a DRI research specialist, said that new technology has been developed by Prof Seales: “In June, we are using a CT-scanner in a dental lab at UCLA to scan the scrolls... Then we will apply a machine learning algorithm that we are developing to reveal the carbon ink writing in the scrolls.”
In an essay for a forthcoming book, Prof Seales and Dr Chapman observe that carbon ink used on the scrolls has remained “obstinately resistant to the naked eye”, but “by creating a detailed reference set of scans containing millions of images that clearly show carbon ink – such as can be seen on many already-opened fragments – the computer can be ‘taught’ how to identify the ‘invisible’ ink within the most damaged, still-rolled scrolls.
Capturing images of visible ink at extremely high resolution provides the basis for teasing out the ink from within intact scrolls and layered fragments and then amplifying it so it can be clearly read.”