Researchers have gotten one step closer to unlocking the secrets encased within scrolls recovered from a villa that was preserved by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii.
The ancient scrolls were preserved in A.D. 79 in the nearby town of Herculaneum, the New York Times reported. When the villa was encased in lava and blazing ash the scrolls were turned into carbonized plant material, making them almost impossible to unroll without destroying them. They are believed to contain lost works of ancient Greek and Roman authors.
A new technique used X-rays beams to look at contrasts between the paper fibers and ink to read letters inside the scrolls without unrolling them. Past X-ray reading attempts have proved difficult because the ancient ink contained soot.
"The papyri have been burnt, so there is not a huge difference between the paper and the ink," study co-author Vito Mocella, a physicist at the National Research Council in Naples, Italy told LiveScience.
So far, the researchers have succeeded in picking out individual Greek letters within the scrolls.
"If the technology is perfected, it will be a real leap forward," Richard Janko, a classical scholar at the University of Michigan told the New York Times.
The team has also determined the physical structure of a Herculaneum scroll, which could allow them to assign the randomly uncovered Greek letters to a position inside the object and put together complete words.
Some of the scrolls that have been successfully opened contained mostly Greek philosophy, some of which was written by Epicurus. The team believes the library also may have contained Latin works that have gotten lost in history.
"For a scholar, it would be wonderful to have a manuscript of Virgil written in his lifetime because what we have are medieval manuscripts which have suffered many changes at the hands of copyists," David Sider, a professor of classics at New York University told the New York Times.
The new technique was described in a recent edition of the journal Nature Communications.
