The Quest to Unlock an Ancient Library

"In trying to read the scrolls, scholars and curators have invariably damaged or destroyed them. The Herculaneum papyri survived only because all the moisture was seared out of them—uncharred papyrus scrolls in non-desert climates have long since rotted away. In each scroll, the tightly wrapped layers of the fibrous pith of the papyrus plant are welded together, like a burrito left in the back seat of a car for two thousand years. But, because the sheets are so dry, when they are unfurled they risk crumbling into dust."

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"Brent Seales, a software engineer .. gave a talk about the possibility of “virtually unwrapping” the scrolls, using a combination of molecular-level X-ray technology, spectral-imaging techniques, and software designed by him and his students at the university."

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"In 2010, at a digital-restoration conference in Helsinki, Seales met Uwe Bergmann, a physicist at Stanford. Seales was familiar with Bergmann’s work on the Archimedes Palimpsest."

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"When Bergmann read about the palimpsest, in an article in GEO that his mother had given him, he immediately thought of employing a synchrotron"

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'Once he obtained access to the palimpsest, Bergmann used X-ray fluorescence imaging, or XRF, in the synchrotron to get pictures of the iron-based molecules in the ink. Unlike MSI, XRF is sensitive to individual elements. Different elements emit characteristic wavelengths of light when the X rays hit them; by zeroing in on iron, Bergmann was able to see the letters. “What had been invisible for centuries was made, right before our eyes, visible,” he said, in an interview published by the Department of Energy. “Line by line, Archimedes’ original writings began to come to life, literally glowing on our screens. It was the most amazing thing.”'

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It is the newyorker, why use a single sentence when a whole paragraph - with endless digressions - will do :)

This is one of those stories that makes me so amazed and angry at the same time. That we can unlock absolutely ancient mysteries and read into a forgotten past is mind bending.

That politics won't let it happen is earth-shattering.

At least this "data" was still somewhat readable after almost 2k years... I'm not so optimistic about a future in which everything will be (very strongly) encrypted by default due to security paranoia, making such attempts at recovery truly impossible. I can almost imagine an article appearing sometime in the future with the same title, but the subject being about DRM'd ebook files to which the keys have been long lost.

Wow. What a great article. How tantalizing to be only inches away from reading lost ancient literature, but unable to unroll it to read it.