Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

Tragedies, both major and minor, have occurred over the centuries, but for me the saddest are the burning of ancient libraries. I know, loss of human life is terrible, but the simple fact is that human lives all end. It’s just the way the game is played. I’m not saying I like it, but it is one of the drawbacks of being alive.

Ideas, however, should be immortal.

This is why the destruction of an ancient library is so very tragic. In the modern world, books exist in thousands of copies, with electronic versions, televised adaptations, and reprints available for a price. Ancient texts, were often one of a kind.

Handwritten, with handmade inks on paper or vellum, papyrus or stamped clay, these books took a lot of effort to produce. Whatever secrets they contain meant a lot to the people that created them.

For me, those partially burned scrolls, so damaged that to attempt to open them would ensure their total destruction, have always been the saddest of all. To have those thoughts, ideas, and secrets just barely out of reach is nearly intolerable.

I guess I wasn’t the only one that felt that way, because scientists working across disciplines have managed a ‘virtual unwrapping’. I’m sure you’ve seen what they can do with a mummy using medical technology, especially MRI and CT scanning. Those technologies allow us to study the remains, determine causes of death, lifestyles, and even identity in some cases, but they simply don’t work on the written word.

A burned scroll, located in Israel in 1970 has been successfully read, without disturbing its delicate structure, by a team led by Brent Seales at the University of Kentucky. Initially scanned by micro-computed tomography. This process has been around since the early 80’s, when it was pioneered by Jim Elliot. It generally uses x-rays to obtain detailed images, but unlike the crude type used to see if junior needs a cast on his arm, this process measures in micrometers of difference.

Still usually associated with medical applications, the tomography process is sensitive enough to tell the difference between paper, and paper with ink. Still, that is only half the battle, because a scroll isn’t a single thickness of paper, it is many rolled very tightly together. Complicate this further with fire and smoke damage, changes in ink thickness due perhaps to changes in the writer’s pressure, and other environmental factors, and reading this raw data becomes a serious task in itself.

That is where the University of Kentucky team’s new software came in. It worked, and beautifully so. The scroll, recovered from the destroyed synagogue at Ein Gedi, revealed a section from the beginning of the book of Leviticus from the Bible buried deep within it.

Scrolls taken from Herculaneum may soon get to undergo similar processes. 1800 papyrus scrolls in the library of Julius Ceasar’s esteemed father-in-law, got turned into charcoal lumps by an unfortunate blast of 600 degree heat from the volcanic eruption that doomed Herculaneum. It is, sadly, the only ancient library to have “survived” to this day, if you can call life as an unreadable carbonized lump survival.

Naturally, scholars have been itching to read these priceless scrolls since they were first discovered, but attempts have not gone well, as unrolling the scrolls to decipher them damages them even further. It doesn’t help at all that the ink used in the region at the time the scrolls were made is formed of smoke residues, which is pretty hard to distinguish from overcooked papyrus. They are currently refining the technique they are using to decipher the scrolls, but enthusiasm is high. Many lost works of Greek and Roman literature may be waiting in those scrolls we have already found, and there are rooms of the villa that haven’t even been excavated yet.

I don’t know about you, but reviving an ancient library, especially the only surviving ancient library that we know of, brings a big smile to my face.

Cheers,

Michelle