In 1752, in the ruins of Herculaneum, one of the towns that was buried in ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D, particular scrolls were unearthed. The scrolls were discovered in the library of a grand villa, which is believed to have been owned by Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. The site became known as the Village of the Papyri, and the documents were considered as a major find. However, these scrolls were charred up into rolled up logs, making the texts more or less useless.
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“Although you can see on every flake of papyrus that there is writing, to open it up would require that papyrus to be really limber and flexible – and it is not anymore,” Brent Seales, director of the Digital Restoration Initiative at the University of Kentucky, tells Davis.
That hasn’t stopped researchers from trying to access the writings, most of which, it’s believed, were lost to history. Attempts have been made to unroll about half the scrolls using various methods, leading to their destruction or causing the ink to fade.
Seales and his team are now seeking to read the text using the Diamond Light Source facility, a synchrotron based in Oxfordshire in the U.K. that produces light that can be billions of times brighter than the sun. They will test out the method on two intact scrolls and four smaller fragments from L’institut de France.
More details at Smithsonian.com.
I hope that the researchers will be able to finally shed light (literally and figuratively) on the scroll, as I also wonder what the text contains.
(Image Credit: Diamond Light Source)
Source: neatorama