Scrolls charred in the Mount Vesuvius eruption of A.D. 79 may be once again readable, returning ancient documents believed to be lost forever.
According to the New York Times, the town of Herculaneum was destroyed in the Vesuvius eruption that famously covered Pompeii in lava. The father-in-law to Julius Caesar, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus owned a villa whose library was preserved throughout the disastrous eruption.
Scientists are now beginning to try and decipher what the ancient texts hold.
"The papyri have been burnt, so there is not a huge difference between the paper and the ink," Vito Mocella, a physicist at the National Research Council in Naples, Italy, told Live Science.
The scrolls were first excavated in 1752 and attempts to extract their contents have been spread out over time since. Mocella and his team say they can read the scrolls using x-ray technology that separates the black ink from the black charring.
"At least we know there are techniques able to read inside the papyri, finally," Mocella told the Times.
"If the technology is perfected, it will be a real leap forward," Richard Janko, a classical scholar at the University of Michigan and a translator on the project, told the Times. "It would have been odd for a villa of this sort not to have had a major library.
"So this technology, when perfected, does open the way to rediscovering a lot more ancient literature."
The possibility of deciphering such ancient texts believed to be lost to the world is causing a stir among those either participating in the study or who have been observing it. Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, helped Mocella in 2009 depict one of the scrolls using a special kind of tomographic method.
"This is absolutely a major step forward," Seales told the Times. "These guys are focused on showing the imagery with best contrast. But to really read the papyrus, you need to untangle its surface, which is the active area of my work."
