Scientists use X-rays to read charred, pre-Vesuvius ancient Roman scrolls

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., the Roman city of Pompeii was buried in lava but nearby Herculaneum was charred with scalding ashes and 608-degree (F) gasses. That made all the difference for a large library of papyrus scrolls discovered at a grand Herculaneum villa in 1752. The scrolls are believed to contain original versions of ancient Greek and Roman histories, literature, and philosophical tomes, plus some unknown works thought lost to history.

The problem is that the scrolls are charred, too delicate to unravel manually — people have tried, with poor results — and the ink used is soot-based, or essentially the same substance as the carbonized parchment. On Tuesday, Italian researcher Vito Mocella and his team reported in the journal Nature Communications that they have developed a way to read the scrolls without unfurling them: X-ray phase-contrast tomography.

The technique, like a CT scan but looking at the phase shifts in X-ray light, is mostly proof-of-concept at this point: Mocella and his colleagues were able to read some words from an unrolled scroll and some Greek letters from an intact one. But it offers the promise of finally uncovering what's in the scroll library, thought to belong to Julius Caesar's father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus. Along with the 300 intact scrolls and various fragments, classical scholars believe a larger library exists below the one already uncovered.

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For a sense of what the charred scrolls and X-ray technique look like, watch Mocella and Emmanuel Brun's video below — but you might want to turn down the volume, as it has an erupting-volcano soundtrack over the scrolling text. —Peter Weber