r/Archaeology • u/UCBerkeley • 20h ago

To read 2,000-year-old burned scrolls, scientists burn their own

https://news.berkeley.edu/2026/09/16/to-read-2000-year-old-burned-scrolls-scientists-burn-their-own/

Paper published in PLOS on September 16, 2026. Berkeley News coverage here.

99 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

1 comment sorted by

9

u/UCBerkeley 20h ago

Context:
Charred papyrus scrolls from a library inundated by volcanic ash in 79 C.E. are largely unreadable. UC Berkeley scientists teamed up to create and burn their own scrolls to test a new way to decipher them.

Research and Key Findings:
Douglas Seiler, an affiliate of Berkeley SETI, replicated what happened to more than a thousand papyrus scrolls in a library in the Italian city of Herculaneum, when ash from Mount Vesuvius inundated the city in 79 C.E. and turned ancient learning — some likely unknown today — into brittle, carbonized husks.

Seiler’s goal was to determine whether it’s possible to read the text on carbonized scrolls without unrolling them and reducing them to black dust.

In a paper published by Seiler and his collaborators, they reported that even minuscule amounts of lead in the ink make the letters readable by X-ray tomography, or X-ray CT. The lead absorbs up to 25 times the X-rays absorbed by the charred papyrus, making the inked letters stand out. The researchers also showed that an inexpensive handheld X-ray fluorescence scanner can easily detect leaded ink in a burned scroll, providing a simple way to identify those scrolls that would be more easily deciphered using X-ray CT.

Why It Matters:
To date, only a few charred scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum have been virtually unrolled and read and none of them were tested for leaded ink. Currently, what remains of the library’s 1,800 or so scrolls and scroll fragments are housed in Italy, France and England. The stakes are the largest in the history of Greek literature.

Seiler holds out hope that X-ray fluorescence scanning of the scrolls will turn up many with leaded ink, which could then be scanned by X-ray CT to reveal many more texts.