PROVO, USA - It used to take scholars weeks or even months to decipher ancient scrolls scorched in the eruption that buried Pompeii - if the texts weren't blackened beyond recognition.
But Brigham Young University researchers have used light-imaging technology originally designed for NASA to clean up the scrolls, making it possible to read texts that date back more than 2,000 years.
``Some scholars have told me they take two to three weeks to read a line of text,'' said BYU project leader Steven Booras, who presented his results Thursday at the annual meeting of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South. ``When that first image came up, I have to admit I was thinking, 'Hey, we've got something here.'''
The scrolls were found at a villa belonging to Julius Caesar's father-in-law that was buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 B.C.
The lava kept the papyri intact, but they were so carbonized by the heat that when they were first uncovered in the 1750s, archaeologists thought they were charcoal and threw many away. Dozens more were lost as scholars tried to separate the rock-hard pages, using everything from corrosive chemicals to saws.
Eventually, about 1,700 scrolls were unrolled and stored at a Naples museum. Because the blackened paper was almost impossible to discern from the jet-black ink, only a few yielded their secrets.
The new technology has changed all that. Using light-imaging photography developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to study minerals on planet surfaces, the scroll fragments look as if they were written last week.
To create the images, Booras takes pictures of each papyrus, slipping filters under the lens of a high-tech digital camera to limit the band of light. Photographers have long used filters to screen out unwanted images, but this system is more precise.
Starting with the naked eye, Booras works his way through the spectrum until the black background starts to drop away. Most often, the best results are with infrared light, which the ink seems to reflect most brightly.
As Booras demonstrated the changes Thursday, running from charcoal-black fragments to clean, clear text, academics in the audience gasped.
``I once spent a full hour or more looking at a scrap of papyrus,'' said Richard Janko, a classicist with University College of London. ``This passage was dead black; we went over it and over it and all we could see was a few letters. ... With this technology, we may be able to rebuild the whole thing.''
That has archaeologists excited about future possibilities.
The multi-spectral imaging system has already been used to decode religious texts found at a Byzantine church in Jordan and to uncover writing behind ancient murals in an Aztec temple in Mexico. And BYU's Institute for the Study and Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts is embarking on a project to examine ancient writings belonging to the Vatican.
For now, scholars are using it to extract new information from the Herculaneum scrolls, which were in the library of poet-philosopher Philodemus. His work is thought to have influenced the great Roman poets Horace and Virgil. He was hired by the villa's owner to tutor his daughter.
For Booras, who is not a classicist, Thursday's results were energizing.
``To have a scholar gasp - that's quite a thrill,'' he said.
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AP-NY-04-20-01 0407EDT