The ancient cult of Mount Vesuvius bury the townsfolk ofHerculaneum , the less well - hump counterpart toPompeii , almost two millennia ago . At the clip , the Roman Empire must have considered it lost for timeless existence , but today , scientist are influence around the clock trying to excavate its secret . Now , a new subject area , publish in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , has revealed that lead ink may hold the cay to deciphering buried scrolls uncovered from the wreckage .
Over 2,000 Egyptian paper reed coil have been find to date from a single house in Herculaneum , the so - calledVilla of the Papyri . Apart from cautiously unroll them to take their contents , X - rayshave also been used by research worker in an attack to glimpse what the more damaged segments of them might say .
Of the scrolls that have been able to have been interpret , most appear to be philosophical in nature , and written in Greek , the spoken language of the elite in the Roman Empire . Unfortunately , it ’s often hard to tell the difference between the varsity letter and the paper rush they ’re written on , and600 scrollsare in such inadequate condition that they are , at present , unreadable . The only way to potentially read these charred , soft , unopened scrolls would be to find a way to differentiate between the ink and the paper .
Now , scientists have made a breakthrough : High degree of lead have been see within two Herculaneum papyrus sherd held at the Institute of France in Paris . This could only be due to the manipulation of lead ink , meaning that X - ray digital scanner could be recalibrated in social club to reveal what the ink might actually say .
The enquiry squad , coordinated by Vito Mocella of the Italian National Research Council , made their find using theEuropean Synchrotronin Grenoble , France , a powerful particle accelerator that can grow X - shaft of light 100 clock time brighter than those used in hospital .
The town was buried in ash by the eruption , and many of its buildings were incredibly well preserved such as this . pavel dudek / Shutterstock
importantly , this discovery press back the exercise of booster cable ink in Hellenic and Roman ms by three or four century . “ From a historical point of panorama , it is a surprisal , ” Mocella , toldNew Scientist .
Intriguingly , the only known use of metal ink prior to this was specifically for the writing ofsecret messagesaround two hundred age in the first place . The team are now poised , with the help of historians and translators , to reveal the recede secrets of hundreds of the most damaged scrolls retrieved from the Villa of the Papyri .
At this point , it ’s anyone ’s speculation as to what ’s written on them . On one mitt , they could be excess works byPhilodemus of Gadara , a fertile philosopher and protégé of Epicurus . Some historian think that the villa was used by one or both as a personal library .
or else , they could be something very different : The buried subroutine library alsocontained a comedy , write in Latin , about a man who wants to get his girlfriend out of the hands of a pandar . Perhaps one of the charred scrolls contains a subsequence .
Either style , Herculaneum ’s immense scroll depository make it one of the well - preserved program library of the classical world . The scrolls owe their survival of the fittest to the intense , rapid parching they receive from the heating plant of the eruption in a room relatively depleted in oxygen . Instead of burn down , they werecarbonizedinto very fragile , compact blocks .
