New View of Old Scrolls

The damaged Herculaneum scrolls are an ancient piece of history that can not be viewed unfurled. However now with everyone may be able to read these 2000 year old scrolls that were carbonized in the Mount Vesuvius volcanic eruption of A.D. 79, with a little help from the University of Kentucky Department of Computer Science.

Professor Brent Seales is now working on a software that would help you see the writing on the scrolls as through they were unrolled. The combination of digital imaging techniques and breakthrough technology will ensure that they way we look at history is never the same again.

Each of the Herculaneum scrolls is 20 to 30 feet in length with estimated 3,000 words on it. In terms of volume that will be like the entire works of Shakespeare and then some. They were discovered as charred clumps in the Villa of the Papyri in the ancient Italian city of Herculaneum beginning in 1752. Its been a long time but till this virtual unrolling was made possible by technology, there was just no way to read them.

This science project members hopes that by the time they are done they would have created a software tool and a set of scans of scrolls that together will transform the hopelessly damaged Herculaneum collection into new literary discoveries.