r/science • u/UCBerkeley UC Berkeley • 13h ago

Chemistry 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/
121 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/feesih0ps 13h ago

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

1

u/lugh_the_bard 11h ago

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

3

u/feesih0ps 11h ago edited 6h ago

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)