Scientists burned their own scrolls to unlock a 2,000-year-old mystery

Douglas Seiler, a Berkeley SETI affiliate, had students write on Egyptian papyrus, then burned the rolls in a furnace to mimic scrolls carbonized at Herculaneum when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 C.E. The work targets reading brittle charred library scrolls without unrolling them; tiny amounts of lead in ancient ink can make writing stand out sharply in X-ray scans, which may help recover lost Greek and Roman texts.