UK scientists stymied in effort to read ancient scrollsBut they are not giving up!
By Jim Warren - jwarren@herald-leader.com (kentucky.com)
Some 2,000-year-old Roman scrolls are stubbornly hanging onto their ancient secrets, defying the best efforts of computer scientists at the University of Kentucky to unlock them.
The researchers have learned much about the scrolls, which were reduced to lumps of carbon in the heat of an eruption by Italy's Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. But they can't read what's written on them.
"What we've found is that the problem is even more challenging than we thought going in," said Brent Seales, Gill professor of engineering in UK's computer science department and leader of the team working on the scrolls.
The UK team spent a month last summer making numerous X-ray scans of two of the scrolls that are stored at the French National Academy in Paris. They hoped that computer processing would convert the scans into digital images showing the interiors of the scrolls and revealing the ancient writing. The main fear, however, was that the Roman writers might have used carbon-based inks, which would be essentially invisible to the scans.
That fear has turned out to be fact.
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Seales says he now hopes that re-scanning the scrolls with more powerful X-ray equipment will reveal the text, which scholars are anxious to read.Bit by bit, a letter at a time, whatever it takes. Until we're done.
Background here.