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Comment by thom | Hacker News Reader

Do we have a sense for what proportion of text is actually retrievable from these scrolls?

That varies greatly on the state of preservation of the scroll. For some of the scrolls we can recover entire columns of text. But this is a best case. Plenty of scrolls, or portions of scrolls, are extremely damaged and warped to where our current methods cannot unroll them through any combination of automated and human driven unrolling. Both of these still have massive headroom for improvement, but achieving that headroom is hard as the preservation gets worse.

To give numbers, for ideal portions of scrolls, we can read 100% of the characters. In nonideal portions of scrolls, we can read 0% of the characters. It's not really possible to quantify how much we could theoretically recover of that 0% through better methods, and how much is truly destroyed.

I'm curious prior to this has there been any research/attempts at chemical methods to strengthen the structure and allow it to be unrolled?

Various physical methods of unrolling, including the use of chemicals, have been attempted over the past 275 years, but none have proven to not destroy the scrolls. As far as I know no physical unrolling has been attempted since the 80s and I believe that now only non destructive methods are being employed. For fragments and already shattered and opened, unrolled scrolls a variety of imaging techniques exist and are still being improved upon by teams and research groups we are not associated with. For unrolled scrolls, I believe at this point no one will ever attempt physical unwrapping ever again.

Where are the shattered scrolls? Is there a list somewhere?

There's a photo of one on this page; they basically explode into dust:

https://gizmodo.com/in-a-first-scientists-fully-deciphered-c...

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