First off, as a refresher and for those late to the show, what is the Vesuvius Challenge? When the Italian volcano Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, it took out the city of Pompei. It also took out several neighboring villages and towns, such as Herculaneum. In the 1700s, during an archeological dig at the Herculaneum site, researchers got into a room that contained a vast number of scrolls that are now believed to have been the library of a rich philosopher.
But they weren't scrolls per se, they were essentially charcoal briquettes. The eruptions' pyroclastic blast and flow had flashed them from papyrus to charcoal in an instant, rendering them too fragile to touch, much less to consider unrolling. The merest touch would cause them to disintegrate.
The Vesuvius Challenge was started as an attempt to make radical new approaches with modern non-invasive scanning technology to 'unroll' these briquettes electronically using CTs, MRIs, whatever people could bring to bear along with software to make them readable.
A prize of $700,000 was awarded a few years ago for one such effort.
Well, progress has been on-going and another major advancement has been achieved.
A retired SETI engineer heard about the problem these researchers were having and got involved. Being involved in SETI, he was familiar with the problem of low signal-to-noise ratios: the scans got very little signal and an awful lot of noise, and had to try to improve the signal to get meaningful data. This was his field!
He started with buying modern papyrus from Egypt that was largely made using the same process used 2,000 years ago. He made ink using lead and some inks bought from Japan, and had high school students transcribe Bible verses, lines from Star Wars, and lines from the 1950s TV show, The Outer Limits. They then carbonized the scroll in a high-temperature oven, simulating the volcanic pyroclastic process. It was then scanned with an imaging technique used to unroll lithium ion batteries. And the scrolls were readable.
This represents a partial solution to the Herculaneum repository. Lots of the scrolls were written with a carbon-based ink, which is difficult to sort out from the carbonization that happened when the volcanic effects transformed them into briquettes. But they've established that a number of the scrolls
were written using high-metal content inks, so this new process should be viable on an unknown number of scrolls. Researchers can use a handheld X-ray fluorescence scanner to qualify which scrolls are candidates for this different technique to minimize handling of the repository.
It will be very interesting to see what results from this.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/09/why-researchers-made-their-own-model-herculaneum-scrolls/Related to the above, this is a 46-page PDF titled "Complete virtual unwrapping and reading of a rolled Herculaneum papyrus". While it is highly technical, it includes photographs of what the carbonized scroll looks like, and not only what the results of the scan look like when it's been reconstructed with software, but the actual translation of it! For me, there's an awful lot of info to geek out over in here, but I freely admit most of it was well over my head.
Still, the reconstruction photos are incredibly awesome!
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.29085![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
