Brent Seals, professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky, called them "Fat Bastard" and "Banana Boy" - two charred, very fragile relics that survived the 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius. BC, which led to the demise of Pompeii and neighboring Herculaneum, which was buried under 80 feet of ash, eventually becoming solid rock.
Now they try to read them
The city was rediscovered in the mid-1700s. Incredibly, the Herculaneum library (known as Villa dei Papiri) was still filled with more than 1,800 scrolls hardened into husks. These religious texts, scientific observations, poetry could provide a completely new understanding of human history. However, solving them proved to be very difficult. The papyri are so damaged and tough from lack of moisture that they suffer from a kind of archaeological rigor mortis. And unlike paralysis that engulfs the body after death, this condition is permanent. Delicate attempts to open the scrolls by hand were disastrous. For a long time it seemed that the secrets of the texts would forever remain locked inside.
But Sils did not share this pessimism. Instead of trying to unwrap the scrolls by hand, he believed, digital opening of texts should be used through computed tomography (CT) scans and penetration software.
“This is the only antiquity library we have,” says Sils.
Seals first became interested in the role of digital manipulation in 1995 when he was invited to help the British Library in London scan and preserve Beowulf. Its 1,000-year-old pages have been damaged by fire and time distorted. These defects were left intact by 2D scanning. The method of retrieving information in this way was borrowed from medicine, which uses computed tomography to detect diseases without surgery. And it was a technical breakthrough.
COMPUTER TOMOGRAPHY OF DAMAGED SCROLL WITH VISIBLE LAYERS (L). THE RED CIRCUIT IS RESTORED DIGITALLY IN A PROCESS CALLED "SEGMENTATION" (R).
Seals believed he could use these diagnostic tools to practically restore the manuscripts, and returned to the British Library in 2000 to study other corrupted documents. After acquiring images using a prototype machine that achieved 3D scanning without physical contact, he wrote software capable of separating the compressed pages. The technique worked - he was able to produce realistic, flat versions of the damaged pages.
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But Sils believed that he could achieve more - look inside the scrolls of Herculaneum without the risk of causing additional harm.
It took Sils 4 years to persuade the French institute to allow him to scan the scrolls. In 2009, this method allowed Sils to discover a fibrous maze of data that originally looked like a spiral string.
But it wasn't that simple. The software was not prepared to handle terabytes of scanned data. It was technically possible to look inside the scrolls; there was no functional way to decipher the content. Sils has proven that you can get images. But the question arose how best to visualize and process them. In 2012-2013. Sils was invited to the Google Cultural Institute, his collaboration with interns helped to develop algorithms with which he and his team updated their software.
In 2014, they were contacted by Pnina Shor, the curator of the Dead Sea Scrolls Project at the Israel Antiquities Authority. Shore heard about Seals' work and would like to know if he could take a look at some of the CT scan data she collected from a 3-inch stick of parchment found in En Gedi, Israel, in 1970. There was probably ink there, but it was darkened by the folds and folds of the parchment.
Sils looked at the images and applied his method to virtual deployment. He used a step he called "texturing" - it identifies density differences and other data on the paper indicating where the ink was used. By registering information about individual voxels - the 3D equivalent of pixels - it can assemble them to look like the familiar letter shape. The data is then smoothed to resemble a spread sheet.
LAYERS OF EN-GEDI SCROLL WRINDED TIGHTLY (L). SPECIAL SOFTWARE IS ABLE TO ISOLATE ONE LAYER FOR TEXT SEARCH (R).
The En Gedi scroll was made from animal skins, which Sils said contrasts better with ink than papyrus and also wins in resolution, which was twice as good as what he used in 2009. In 2015, the results were sent to Israel. It was incredible - the first two chapters of Leviticus - the earliest example of a biblical text after the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves.
At a conference in March this year, Seals and his team presented new results showing success in defining column structure (17 characters per line), as well as reading single letters and even whole names. The scrolls are scanned with X-ray light beams like the Diamond Light Source in the UK. They were found to be powerful enough to reveal the amount of lead in paint.
It may seem that Sils is marking time, but it is not. He went from depicting wrapped papyrus to isolating a well-defined letter. All his further developments and research largely depend on funding, but it is not stable. But Sils is optimistic and hopes that he will eventually be able to decipher the texts in the scrolls.
