The team then carbonized the scrolls in a high-temperature furnace to mimic the original Herculaneum Scrolls, and co-author/physicist Jake LaManna created 3D X-ray scans of the charred models at NIST’s Center for Neutron Research in Maryland. “The letters lit up like a Christmas tree,” said Seiler, adding: “It’s amazing what you can get electrons to do.” Co-author Michael Cyrus Daugherty, also of NIST, adapted a software program he wrote to run CT scans of so-called “jelly rolls” in lithium-ion batteries to digitally unwrap the model rolls and reveal the text.
That’s good news for the Vesuvius Challenge, which first awarded a prize for decoding the first letters in 2023 and awarded the $700,000 grand prize the following year for creating the first readable text. Last year, the first X-ray image of the interior of a scroll (PHerc. 172) held in the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford University was created. Earlier this year, PHerc. 1667 was read in its entirety and was a philosophical treatise on ethics and the moral progress of man. The work of Seiler et al. could help speed up this laborious process.
“With lead in the ink, you would get a hell of a signature, so you really have to look for scrolls with lead in them,” Seiler said. “They have trouble reading many of them because of the low contrast of the carbon ink on carbon paper. We’re relatively confident that if they start looking for lead, or if they let us look for lead, it will help that whole process.” Even a portable X-ray fluorescence scanner is enough to determine which scrolls would be most promising for further analysis.
“Honestly, for me, coming here is just as unique as our research,” said Seiler. “I mean, inorganic chemistry, papyrus, X-ray tomography, AI – it’s really a pretty diverse group of scientists and methods to get to the point that, yes, if there’s lead in these scrolls, you can read the images much better. I’ll give you odds of 10 to 1. We want it to be our team, but if another team takes this idea – which is fine – we don’t care.”
PLoS ONE, 2026. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0353485 (About DOIs).
