[blackstache]

I can second the recommendation of Herculaneum, it is an incredible site and I really enjoyed my visit.

There was a collection of papyrus scrolls in the Villa dei Papiri there, which were carbonized by the ash. They were damaged and preserved at the same time by the eruption, so we still have many of them today but the intact scrolls fall apart if you try to open them by hand (similar to trying to unroll a piece of charcoal).

I have been working for a while on a research team that is attempting to read these scrolls noninvasively using micro-CT. The materials of this particular collection are the perfect storm of challenges for this approach, but we are chipping away at the problem. It has been quite a lot of fun to work on. Should anyone find it interesting, here[1] is some of our work from earlier this year, showing a proof of concept on how we can distinguish carbon ink from carbonized papyrus in X-ray even though they appear identical at first.

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

[dr_dshiv]

"...constructing a custom micro-CT system capable of scanning the larger Herculaneum pieces is feasible using existing technology."

Unbelievable. Are we really that close?

If I might ask: what texts do you secretly hope might be found?

[blackstache]

If the morphology hypothesis (of the above paper) is more or less true, then it would indicate it is possible to detect the ink signal if the resolution of the CT scan is roughly at least as small as the thickness of the ink layer on the papyrus surface. We have measured this on some proxy manuscripts made in the lab to be on the order of 5 microns. So if you can scan an entire scroll at that resolution, in theory the data is all there.

The micro-CT machines currently available are either optimized for smaller object sizes or for lower resolutions. The challenge is to build a machine that can scan a "large" object such as an entire scroll at a high resolution. The above comment is saying that you could design and build such a machine using components currently available (expensive, but possible).

That's not the sole obstacle though, next you have to extract the information you want (visible text) from the resulting data. There are some more challenges here yet to be solved, notably segmenting out the individual layers from each other. This is particularly hard with the Herculaneum scrolls, as there are often hundreds of layers all smashed together, and they are wrinkled and warped. But we're working on this too!

Edit: as for the contents, it could be just about anything from the time period. Many of these scrolls have been opened manually over the last two hundred years since their discovery. This has largely destroyed them into thousands of fragments, but in many cases has revealed some text, so we know some of the contents of the library. Much of it is by Philodemus, who was an Epicurean philosopher but not particularly notable. It is believed that there could be more scrolls from other sections of the library still buried, as much of the town is not excavated. If it is shown that we can indeed read the contents noninvasively, it might be an incentive to dig up more of them and see what is there.

[dr_dshiv]

Thanks for the details.

I'd like to understand the potential for recovering lost works of any kind. What sort of organizations exist for this?

Burned scrolls, is one source.

In India, there are thousands of manuscripts rotting in temple treasuries.

Palimsets have yet to be discovered in archives.

And even archives themselves may contain lost treasures through misclassification.

Are there other potential sources for finding lost manuscripts?