HONG KONG: Scientists in Italy have managed to decipher text on a badly scorched papyrus roll from Herculaneum, a town destroyed with Pompeii in the Mount Vesuvius eruption of 79AD. The imaging technique they used may allow archaeologists to analyse other texts previously thought to be too badly damaged to read.
Using a powerful X-ray procedure, Italian researchers have been able to read letters hidden inside two carbonized papyri without unrolling them.
“It’s the first time a technology achieves such a result,” Vito Mocella, a physicist from the National Research Council’s Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems (CNR-IMM) in Naples, told Discovery News. “Until now, imaging techniques have been unable to view the carbon-based ink of these papyri, even when they could penetrate the different layers of their spiral structure.”
The scrolls used by Mocella’s team were excavated 260 years ago from the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, a magnificent seafront estate perhaps owned by Lucius Calpurnius Piso, Julius Caesar’s father-in-law.
The villa housed one of the finest libraries of antiquity. Consisting mainly of Epicurean philosophical texts, the scrolls were carefully stored in shelves covering the walls.
During the devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius, the scrolls, as well as the Herculaneum citizens, were burned by a furnace-like blast of hot gas.
