
From invisibility to readability: Recovering the ink of Herculaneum - diodorus
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0215775
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blackstache
Oh, cool to see this here! I am one of the authors of the paper, I can answer
questions later today.

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kingo55
How much written content in Herculaneum do you expect this technique will
reveal?

Do you expect your technique will apply to other ancient texts beyond just
Herculaneum?

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blackstache
Ultimately, the sky is the limit with the Herculaneum collection. It will
probably be a slow and steady build though. We are working to prove the
methods on the real Herculaneum material, at which point we can start
extending the method to more of the intact scrolls. The segmentation and some
other steps of the process still involve some manual work, so even once the
concept is proven we will want to further automate those steps. If this all
goes well, it would be an incentive for those in charge of the archaeological
site to further explore parts of the still-buried Villa and look for more
scrolls from the library. But even of those already excavated, we are looking
at on the order of hundreds of intact scrolls that contain many columns of
text each and are currently entirely unseen.

The technique definitely applies to other artifacts! The core pipeline we call
Virtual Unwrapping and has been used to successfully reveal some ancient
texts[1]. The primary challenge in this post is addressing the "carbon ink
problem" specifically, where the ink looks identical in density to the uninked
papyrus. But some artifacts make it easier, for example they are written with
iron gall ink which shows up quite clearly in X-ray CT.

[1]
[https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/9/e1601247.full](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/9/e1601247.full)

