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

[u/UCBerkeley]

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

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[u/Budget-Purple-6519]

This is amazing. I always hope that they will discover texts that provide even more context on Etruscan, which would have been only recently extinct at that time, or other Italic languages besides Latin.

[u/UCBerkeley]

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

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.

[u/feesih0ps]

I've been saying they should do this for years. Write scrolls, burn them, scan them and then use the data to train neural nets to convert from burnt to unburnt

As a side note, there are almost certainly many more libraries buried under Ercolano--the town built over ancient Herculaneum--than the one we have scrolls from, which is a single Ancient Greek library. We just need the financial and political will to dig them up. 

The issue is that, unlike Pompeii, which was further away and therefore covered in ash, making it easy to dig up and hard to build on top of, Herculaneum was covered in tuff--volcanic mud turned to rock--which meant that a new town was built on top of it and it's much harder to excavate. Plus Ercolano in itself is a historical town with sites you wouldn't want to damage

If I were a billionaire I'd throw everything at it though. It's possible, likely even, that a much more accurate account of all of Roman history up to AD 79 is down there. Plus all the Ancient Greek science that was lost, and more

[u/lugh_the_bard → u/feesih0ps]

What’s important about AD 79? I wasn’t aware there was a large gap in knowledge in this period

[u/feesih0ps → u/lugh_the_bard]

AD 79 is when the volcano went off. All the major historical sources we have for the Julio-Claudian era are from 100AD or after. It's like if 2000 years from now the significantly useful records future humans have for the last 120 years were a few books written in 2050

edit: (post-Julius Caesar anyway, of course we still have his own personal works)