How X-Ray Offered Peek Inside 2,000-Year-Old Herculaneum Scroll

Researchers have revealed the identity of the author behind a charred scroll from the first century BC, thanks to the advanced X-ray technology. Found in the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum, the scroll contains part of a multi-volume work titled "On Vices" and was written by an ancient Greek philosopher, Philodemus. 

The charred scroll was recovered from a Roman villa, believed to have been the home of Julius Caesar's father-in-law. The scroll, along with the villa, was buried during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago. 

Using the X-ray, the researchers were able to look inside the burned scroll, which was made up of ancient paper called carbonised papyrus. They virtually unwrapped the scroll and, for the first time with this method, managed to uncover important details such as the title and the author. This was made possible because the X-ray images revealed traces of ink lettering.

Dr Michael McOsker, a papyrologist at University College London, told The Guardian, "It's the first scroll where the ink could just be seen on the scan. Nobody knew what it was about. We didn't even know if it had writing on." It is one of the three ancient scrolls from Herculaneum now kept at the Bodleian Library at Oxford. 

Many ancient scrolls have been discovered earlier and are currently kept at the National Library of Naples. But when researchers attempted to open them and read, they couldn't, for the scrolls were burned during the volcanic eruption. Even the ink is hard to read on the black, carbonised papyrus.

So, in 2023, a Vesuvius Challenge was launched worldwide to help read the Herculaneum scrolls using 3D X-rays technology. It carried an award for anyone who could successfully decode the ancient texts.

Last year, a group of tech-savvy students won $700,000 (approx. Rs 6 crore) grand prize for using artificial intelligence software that allowed them to decode 2,000 Greek letters from another scroll.

Dr Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky who co-founded the Vesuvius Challenge, said, "We're seeing evidence of ink in many of the new scrolls we've scanned, but we haven't converted that into coherent text yet."

"That's our current bottleneck: converting the massive scan data into organised sections that are properly segmented, virtually flattened, and enhanced so that the evidence of ink can then be interpreted as actual text," he added.