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Then the team carbonized the scrolls in a high-temperature furnace to mimic the original Herculaneum scrolls, and co-author\/physicist Jake LaManna created 3D X-ray scans of the charred models at NIST\u2019s Center for Neutron Research in Maryland. \u201cThe letters lit up like a Christmas tree,\u201d said Seiler, adding, \u201cIt\u2019s amazing what you can get electrons to do.\u201d Co-author Michael Cyrus Daugherty, also of NIST, adapted a software program he\u2019d written to unroll CT scans of so-called \u201cjelly rolls\u201d inside lithium-ion batteries to digitally unwrap the model scrolls and reveal the text.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s good news for the Vesuvius Challenge, which made its first award for deciphering the first letters in 2023 and awarded the grand prize of $700,000 for producing the first readable text the following year.\u00a0Last year brought the successful generation of the first X-ray image of the inside of a scroll (PHerc. 172) housed in the University of Oxford\u2019s Bodleian Libraries. Earlier this year, PHerc. 1667 was read in full, revealing it to be a philosophical treatise on ethics and human moral progress. The work of Seiler et al. could help speed up this painstaking process.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith lead in the ink, you would get a huge friggin\u2019 signature, so you really need to be looking for scrolls with lead in them,\u201d Seiler said. \u201cThey\u2019re having problems reading a lot of them because of the low contrast of carbon ink on carbon paper. We\u2019re relatively certain that if they start searching for lead, or they let us search for lead, it will help this whole process.\u201d Even a handheld X-ray fluorescence scanner is sufficient to determine which scrolls would be the most promising candidates for further analysis.<\/p>\n
\u201cHonestly, getting here is, for me, just as unique as our research,\u201d Seiler said. \u201cI mean, inorganic chemistry, papyrus, X-ray tomography, AI\u2014it\u2019s really quite an eclectic group of scientists and methodology to get to the point that, yes, if there\u2019s lead in those scrolls, you guys will be able to read the images much better. I\u2019ll give you 10-to-1 odds. We\u2019d like it to be our team, but if some other team is going to take this idea\u2014which is OK\u2014we don\u2019t care.\u201d<\/p>\n
PLoS ONE, 2026. DOI: 10.1371\/journal.pone.0353485 \u00a0(About DOIs).<\/p>\n