Burning Model Scrolls

True story.... Years ago my poor pregnant wife woke up to the smell of smoke to find me burning model scrolls in the living room. :) I was burning them to observe damage patterns and practice reconstructing fragmentary scrolls.

A new article reports how several scholars have gone and done that as a test case for virtually unwrapping carbonized scrolls like the Herculaneum papyri. They used modern papyrus with lead-laced ink, carbonized it, and then went through the process of scanning and virtually unwrapping it. Their conclusion that metallic additives in the ink make the scanning process more effective and easier is not particularly novel, since we have already observed that in other scrolls like the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll. The real challenge is reading and unrolling scrolls without metal additives. But it does sound like a fun experiment, and the authors hope that it can serve as a ground truth for benchmarking other studies and methods.

Vesuvius Challenge Results

In the news recently, scholars have succeeded in virtually unrolling and reading 20 columns of a scroll from Herculaneum. This technology has been developing rapidly over the past few years, and this is the biggest success to date.

Virtual Unrolling of Herculaneum Papyri

 See an interesting, short documentary on the virtual unrolling of the Herculaneum papyri.

Competition for Deciphering Herculaneum Rolls

Brent Seales and his team have announced a new competition to see who can read rolled up and carbonized Herculaneum scrolls. Unlike the En Gedi Leviticus scroll that had metallic ink, up to now it has proven very difficult to read these Herculaneum scrolls that used a carbon-based ink. So this would truly be an important development in the field.