UK Computer Scientists Pioneer New View Of Historical Scroll

For the first time since Mount Vesuvius erupted, killing off an ancient city while freezing it in time, computer scientists are on the brink of reading literature, philosophy and history from scrolls they can’t even unroll.

The minds leading the way in these advances are from UK.

"What we’re seeing here is what the inside of the scroll looks like, it’s one slice and as you can see, the slice shows the way the papyrus wraps around and that’s what the scroll looks like. It’s coiled up,” said Dr. Brent Seales, standing over the shoulder of a masters’ student Wednesday afternoon.

It’s been twelve years since Dr. Seales, chair of UK Computer Science, starting looking at a scroll recovered from Pompeii, the city destroyed but preserved when Mt. Vesuvius erupted. Now though, he’s actually seeing it.

"Yea, it’s been a long time coming right,” joked Dr. Seales.

He and a group of researchers, made up of University of Kentucky faculty and staff have traveled back and forth from Europe of those 12-years, working with scientists to try and unravel the mystery within the scroll, which as Dr. Seales explained, is carbonized from the volcanic ash and impossible to open.

"Well the scroll is made of papyrus, the material that the writing is on and it’s rolled up. And normally if you had something like a newspaper that had writing on it that was rolled up, you’d just unroll it and read it because the pages are supposed to be flat. These pages are carbonized so they can’t be unrolled, it’s rigid and solid."

It was 2009 when University of Kentucky faculty and students first took images of the scrolls on a machine much like one in their lab. Four years later, it was in a much larger facility where students and faculty worked with international researchers to start making breakthroughs.

That breakthrough? Phase Contrast Micro-Tomography. To the average person, it’s about as understandable as the Greek the scroll will soon reveal.

"The way it works is that we image it in a way so that we can see slices that go all the way through, digitally and the trick is to put all those slices back together so that the pages come back out and you can read the writing,” explained Dr. Seales.

Project manager, Seth Parker compared the process to a modern day medical technique.

"Most people are familiar with C-T imagery, medical C-T, basically the exact same thing except you’re really increasing the contrast of that."

"In the data we have real ink signal so when we find these layers we’re going to actually be reading text,” added Dr. Seales.

Text that makes the University of Kentucky and Dr. Seales’ computer science department pioneers in the effort to keep discovering.

Dr. Seales and his research group will head back to Europe in the spring with the goal of collecting more data from the scroll.