After almost 2000 years since his writing, a parchment from the Roman city of Herculaneum, carbonized following the eruption of the Vezuviu volcano from 79 AD, begins to reveal its content.
The new technologies have the “reading” of lava carbonized parchments. Photo archive
Of the hundreds of carbonized parchments by the Vezuviu volcano lava that have been discovered in Herculaneum, one enjoys special attention lately, especially after billionaire Elon Musk, CEO Tesla and Spacex, has offered to finance his translation, in the framework of an international competition.
Because it is too fragile to be physically opened, scientists have used images obtained with X -ray and artificial intelligence to be able to perform virtually.
The specialists involved in the activity of examining the parchment say that there is a lot of work to do completely legible and thus decipher the content, but they estimate, on the other hand, that the results are very promising.
“We are confident that we will be able to read almost the entire parchment. This is the first time we can say this with great confidence ”, He said, for the BBC, Stephen Parsens, the head of the Vesuvius Challenge project, after the partial disclosure of the interior text, organized on rows and columns, was succeeded.
The papyrus is part of a collection of hundreds of such carbonized documents that have been discovered in the old Roman city of Herculaneum, for whose deciphering the multi-miliarder Elon Musk offered a consistent award in an international competition. Considered illegible, they have been left untouched for decades.
The new technologies now allow the analysis of such parchments, without endangering their integrity. In the past, some of the carbonized documents discovered in Pompeii were opened, but they crushed into pieces.
“We have never been convinced so far that any of the techniques would be secure or efficient to obtain information from parchments.” explained Nicole Gilroy, the head of the Conservation Department of Oxford University, in whose library there are some of these parchments.
How was the parchment “read”
However, the possibilities offered by contemporary technology caused scientists to remove one of the precious parchments, which was placed in a specially designed and taken to Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire.
Inside a device called Synchotron there is a powerful X -ray beam that can probe the document without damage, by accelerating the electrons to near the speed of light. After 3D reconstruction, the layers inside the parchment must be identified, and the specialists say it would be about 10 m of papyrus.
“We must realize which layer is different from the next layer, so that we can run digital”, they explained what the difficulties they face.
The next step was the detection of the over 2,000 -year -old ink, made with the help of Ai, a trial made by the fact that both the papyrus and the ink are made of carbon. Specifically, you would look for the smallest signs of ink, which they reproduce digitally, thus highlighting the letters.
Some letters are already visible in the ancient text, and the team of scientists believes that it is, in this case, a work of philosophy.
“We can say that the whole parchment is full of text. Now we can work to make it appear more clearly. We will move from a few words to truly substantial passages ”, mentioned the head of the Vesuvius Challenge project.
Last year, another Vesuvius Challenge team managed to exhibit about 5% of a Herculaneum parchment. According to specialists, content represents a sample from Epicur’s philosophy.
