In his home lab, Douglas Seiler put a roll of papyrus that students had written on inside a steel container and heated it in a furnace until it charred. On the papyrus, high school students had written passages from Star Wars and the Bible with reed pens. Seiler was trying to destroy something on purpose, so he could learn how to read what a volcanic eruption had nearly destroyed 2,000 years earlier.The peer-reviewed underlying technical article in PLOS One is open access:[...]
A model carbonized papyrus scroll opens a novel path to identifying readable scrolls of the Herculaneum LibraryFor many PaleoJudaica posts on the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE and its destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and on the efforts to reconstruct and decipher the carbonized library at Herculaneum, start here and follow the links. Cross-file under Herculaneum Watch and Technology Watch.
Douglas Seiler, Jacob Michael LaManna, Michael McOsker, David Kreimer, Michael Cyrus Daugherty, Jens Dopke
Published: September 16, 2026
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0353485Abstract
We report the successful fabrication of a laboratory-made carbonized papyrus scroll and the virtual unrolling and reading of its custom leaded ink text, using X-ray tomography. We believe this is the first confirmed proof of concept to show that the presence of lead in Herculaneum scrolls would greatly increase the probability for successful reading. This synthetic model enables systematic variation of ink formulations, including leaded inks, to generate ground-truth datasets for the development and validation of text-detection algorithms intended for use on the Herculaneum scrolls. By altering the ink composition from pure carbon to an ink enriched with lead, an X-ray contrasting agent, our team can provide datasets which can be used to test algorithmic performance. Inks containing only carbon present a more challenging detection scenario, serving as a baseline for recovery efforts. The lab-made scroll was constructed from modern Egyptian papyrus and ink incorporating a soluble lead salt, then carbonized and imaged using a laboratory-grade X-ray tomography system. The scroll was virtually unrolled using custom-developed software. Additionally, we found that a handheld X-ray fluorescence (XRF) device could detect lead in the ink post-carbonization. This suggests that XRF may be a practical screening method for identifying ancient scrolls likely to contain lead-based ink and therefore have a higher probability of being successfully read.
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