Ancient papyri written in Greek, which had been burned by the catastrophic eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD and had been buried in the ashes of the neighboring city of Heraklion (Herculaneum), will reveal secrets , as scientists managed, with the help of a powerful new X-ray technique, to read the first words in two of these manuscripts.
Italian scientists from the Institute of Microelectronics and Microsystems of the National Research Council in Naples, led by physicist Vito Mocella, who made the relevant publication in the journal "Nature Communications", in collaboration with their French colleagues, according to the BBC, "Science" and "Nature", managed to read part of the content of the half-destroyed papyri that are folded, without opening them.
The papyri in question, along with hundreds of others, were discovered in 1754 and were part of a library of 600 to 700 books, which was located in a small room of a small Roman villa in Heraklion, a city that was destroyed along with Pompeii when the volcano erupted, which is why it was called "the other Pompeii.".
The villa and library (essentially the only one to have survived from classical antiquity), which is full of Epicurean philosophical treatises, are believed to have belonged to a wealthy Roman politician, perhaps Julius Caesar's father-in-law, Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus.
After the eruption of Vesuvius, a wave of hot air, reaching 320 degrees Celsius, burned the delicate papyri and left them charred in a state too vulnerable for researchers to try to open and read them (usually with infrared cameras), without seriously risking damaging them. Thus, until today, these handwritten papyri, which can reach 15 meters in length when unrolled, have kept their secrets.
Italian scientists have used a new X-ray tomography technology to separate the burnt papyrus substrate from the black ink letters, thanks to the subtle but distinct difference in how the two materials (papyrus and ink) refract X-rays. For this purpose, the researchers used the European Synchrotron, located in Grenoble. The letters are just 0.1 millimeters above the surface of the papyrus, but they can be read.
The new technique brought to light individual letters of the Greek alphabet, as well as some complete Greek words, in two manuscripts, one of which had previously been unrolled. The two papyri had been given as a gift to Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802 and today belong to the Institut de France. It is not surprising that they are written in Greek, as there was a long-standing Greek presence in that part of Italy.
Comparing them with another surviving papyrus from Heraklion, written by the Epicurean philosopher and poet Philodemus of the 1st century BC, the researchers do not rule out that he is the author of the one burned papyrus as well.
For now, researchers have not managed to illuminate the full content of the papyri, but they believe they will succeed if they resort to an even more powerful X-ray machine. Vito Mocella spoke of a “revolution in papyrology,” and hopes that, thanks to the new technology, the way is opened for reading a multitude of previously unread ancient texts.
Source: protothema.gr
