Briefing Chat: Why scientists made papyrus scrolls, then burnt them

Benjamin Thompson (0:04)

Hi, everyone, Benjamin here, welcome to the Friday edition of the podcast, The Briefing Show, where we talk about some of the stories that have been featured in The Nature Briefing, which is, of course, Nature's daily email roundup of the latest science news. Joining me this week is Sharmini Bundel. Sharmini, thank you for being here.

Sharmini Bundell (0:21)

Hello, I've got a question for you today, Ben. And that is, how do you read an ancient scroll that's been turned into basically an unopenable lump by a literal volcano?

Benjamin Thompson (0:34)

Do you know what? Strong question.

Sharmini Bundell (0:35)

Yeah, this is a big problem, particularly if you're a historian who is studying life around the time of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and you have a whole load of nearly 2,000-year-old scrolls that you tantalisingly can't get into. You can't actually read them because you can't open them. But some researchers have been making their own scrolls, making and baking their own scrolls, to try and help this problem.

Benjamin Thompson (1:02)

Really? Right, because, of course, we talk a lot about antiquity then, and there's potentially absolute treasure, contemporaneous treasure, I suppose, hidden in these charred scrolls. But you can't just try and unwrap them, right? Because they will shatter into a million pieces.

Sharmini Bundell (1:17)

People tried.

Benjamin Thompson (1:18)

Really? Yeah.

Sharmini Bundell (1:19)

When they were discovered, there definitely are ones that people did try and open, and they're just shattered. And I think there are still historians trying to piece those ones together as well.

But there are loads left and loads that haven't been touched, including the ones that were the worst burnt, if that's a phrase. But it's tantalising. It's there. It's probably the only complete library from that period, if it is indeed even all the library that exists. There was basically this fancy villa in Herculaneum, near Vesuvius, and they've got hundreds of scrolls from it that are around the world in different museums that they can't get into. But loads of people are, as we speak, working on, how do we get into them? How do we look into them? And this is a new paper that I read about in Nature from a Plus One article. And it's using a slightly different technique to the ones that have been focused on so far.

Benjamin Thompson (2:13)

Okay, so if just brute force is clearly out there, you're saying that some researchers are trying to recreate the situation to then work out how to undo it.

Sharmini Bundell (2:22)

Exactly. So this is a new technique that they're trying, which is basically about trying to look for lead that is in the ink that would have been used to write on the scrolls.

And so what they did was they basically tried to recreate the technique. They've got some papyrus. They've got Egyptian reed pens. They've got traditional lamp black ink from Japan, trying to get as sort of authentic as possible to make their own scrolls, which they then rolled up and put in a furnace to basically recreate volcano conditions and see if they could then detect the lead in the ink, which they did using x-rays, basically. The x-rays can distinguish between the papyrus material and the lead in the letters that's written on it.

Benjamin Thompson (3:13)

So they can write, what, hello world on their fake scroll, roll it up, put it in the furnace, come back, put it in their equipment, and bingo, there it is, hello world.

Sharmini Bundell (3:23)

Yeah, they've got, so this is in fact written in English and not ancient Greek or Latin, but yeah, they've got pictures of the text kind of like glowing in, there's a fluorescent scanner. There's different things that they've used. So traditionally, all these scrolls are being studied by CT scanning, so X-ray computed tomography. So people are taking these scrolls basically to like big synchrotron facilities to try and get into them, get all the details, all the sort of possible subtle differences between the inks and the papyrus. But usually, up until now, when people have been looking for this, they've been looking for really subtle differences because the CT scans focus on the carbon, and then there's carbon in both the ink and the papyrus.

So people have been using machine learning algorithms to try and pass out these subtle differences.

So that's actually been going quite well, right? There's been results this year and last year where people have quite successfully been able to read the actual original, like some bits of texts from these scrolls. And I think earlier this year, the first complete scroll was analyzed using this CT scan method. But this different method, which they haven't tried on an actual scroll, they've just sort of tested out, as I said, on their own scrolls. They did do it in a big CT scanner, but they also did it in their own little X-ray setup, like a much smaller machine, because it's just much easier to do because the lead actually stands out. So this might also be interesting because you don't need to do the big scans and you can use a hand-held X-ray fluorescence device, and hopefully, yeah, see the glowing letters just like they have on theirs.