Read the first words in burnt papyrus from Herculaneum

The ancient Roman city of Herculaneum was not fortunate enough to be near Vesuvius, so on August 24, 79, it ceased to exist, sharing the fate of Pompeii. For many centuries they forgot about him, until in 1710 a peasant digging a well did not stumble upon marble fragments. Since then, excavations have been conducted for 300 years in an attempt to restore the buildings of the ancient city.

One of the most significant finds of Herculaneum was the rich villa, which belonged to a certain educated citizen. The villa found an extensive library with many scrolls (papyrus), so the building was called the Villa of the Papyrus .
')
The problem is that many of the papyrus found are so caked and charred that it is impossible to deploy and read them without damaging them. But recently there was hope. With the help of X-ray scanning, scientists were able to distinguish individual letters and words on papyrus , and in the future they hope to fully restore the texts.


Getty Villa in Malibu (USA) - a copy of the ancient Roman villa of the Papyrus

To date, about 1,800 scrolls have been found in the villa. For those who managed to deploy in past centuries, the paint begins to degrade after contact with the air, so that scientists had to rewrite texts to another medium and put up with the loss of artifacts.

In addition, when unfolded, some parts remained sintered with each other, after which it was not possible to restore their precious contents.

The project on scanning scrolls began in 2007 at the French National Center for Scientific Research. For the work they used papyrus, presented to Napoleon by the King of Naples in 1802.


The charred papyrus from Herculaneum, once presented to Napoleon

Scanning revealed that in the expanded state the scrolls have a length of 11 to 15 meters. However, at the first stage it was not possible to recover any texts. The fact is that carbon-based inks were used for recording, and the papyruses themselves have almost the same chemical composition, so it was not easy to distinguish the paint using traditional methods.

Only in 2013, a group of specialists from the Italian National Research Council was able to develop a new X-ray tomography method with phase contrast (x-ray phase-contrast tomography, XPCT), which nevertheless made it possible for the first time to recognize individual letters in these scrolls.

Instead of examining absorption patterns, XPCT analyzes the change in the phase of X-ray waves. Passing through the scroll in areas of different density, the waves change their characteristics. A similar principle is used in medical X-rays. Only here I had to use much more powerful radiation and accurate detectors, namely, the equipment at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility particle accelerator in Grenoble.


24 Greek letters distinguishable among scan results

As a result, it was possible to recognize not only individual letters on different layers, but also several separate words: ΠΙΠΤΟΙΕ (“fall”) and ΕΙΠΟΙ (“say”).



The results of the study of Italian experts published on January 20, 2015 in the journal Nature Communications.

---

So far, excavations at the Papyrus villa have been temporarily suspended due to lack of funds and the position of the Italian authorities (they prefer conservation, not research), although only 10% of the territory has been cleared of rock.

Now that the opportunity has appeared to read the scrolls, the Italian authorities may agree to continue the excavation. Previously, they had an argument: why destroy the cultural layer, if we still can not read these papyruses.

Scientists suggest that scrolls with the lost texts of the dialogues of Aristotle, the plays of Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus can be stored in the unexplored areas of the villa. “Everyone who is interested in the ancient world is always concerned about the opportunity to get at least one new paragraph, one chapter,” says Roger Macfarlane, a classicism researcher at Brigham Young University (Utah, USA). “The prospect of getting hundreds of new books is staggering.”