X-ray technique 'reads' burnt Vesuvius scroll (BBC)
By Jonathan Webb
Science reporter, BBC News
20 January 2015 Last updated at 14:36 ET
For the first time, words have been read from a burnt, rolled-up scroll buried by Mount Vesuvius in AD79.
The scrolls of Herculaneum, the only classical library still in existence, were blasted by volcanic gas hotter than 300C and are desperately fragile.
Deep inside one scroll, physicists distinguished the ink from the paper using a 3D X-ray imaging technique sometimes used in breast scans.
They believe that other scrolls could also be deciphered without unrolling.
The work appears in the journal Nature Communications.
***
more: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-30888767
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-30888767
Very neat ! But I thought this would have been tried with terahertz imaging first.
= new reply since forum marked as read
