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In 1752, workers excavating² Herculaneum uncovered a large villa³ and discovered what appeared to be sticks of charcoal⁴ in large quantities. What they really had found were 2000-year-old scrolls⁶, ancient works of papyrus⁷ scrolls, all carbonized by an indiscriminate pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius.

 

To the naked eye, they are nothing more than black crumbly paper. But thanks to a process developed by NASA called multispectral imaging, words suddenly appear from the blackness and read like yesterday's newspaper.

 

Using a visible filter, this is the image we are getting, very little writing. Now I am gonna stop the camera. We are gonna take a look at the very same scroll⁵ taken with an infrared⁸ filter. This same fragment now taken with a thousand-nanometer filter, so now we have the text that's perfectly⁹ readable, as if it was relatively¹⁰ recently written.

 

And it's opened up a treasure trove¹¹ of literature for classical scholars to examine. The writings are believed to be that of first century B.C. philosopher Philodemus. Some are in Greek, others in Latin.

 

Since 1999, researchers from Brigham Young University have been examining the scrolls of the Historic National Library in Naples, Italy. In that time, the BYU team has carefully exposed nearly 1,000 scrolls to the multispectral process and collected more than 20,000 images.

 

Scholars believe that this same Herculaneum villa may contain in its library the written words of Aristotle and other Greek and Latin authors. In the meantime, researchers and historians at Brigham Young are creating a digital archive of the text. And it's a good thing. The scrolls have kept their secrets for more than two millennia¹², and despite the best conservation efforts, they are rapidly being lost to volcano again.

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