A model carbonized papyrus roll opens a novel path to identifying readable rolls of the Herculaneum Library

Published

September 16, 2026

Author(s)

DOUGLAS SEILER, Jacob LaManna, Michael McOsker, David Kreimer, Michael Daugherty, Jens Dopke

Abstract

Our team successfully created a lab-made carbonized papyrus roll and virtually unrolled and read the words using X-ray tomography. The ability to create carbonized papyrus rolls will allow rolls to be created with varying formulations of ink to provide data for algorithm development with ground truth that can be used on the real Herculaneum rolls. Varying formulas of ink can be used, changing the contents from pure carbon to high proportions of a heavy metal like lead. The pure carbon inks provide challenging data as a basis for recovering the text. The lab-made roll was created using modern Egyptian papyrus and ink containing lead salt; it was then imaged using a laboratory-grade X-ray tomography scanner and virtually unrolled using custom-developed unrolling software. It was found that a handheld X-ray fluorescence device could measure lead content in the lab-made roll. This method can be used to identify rolls that contain lead in the ink which have a higher probability of being read.

Citation

PLoS One

Pub Type

Journals

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Keywords

X-ray tomography, XRF, archeology

Citation

SEILER, D. , LaManna, J. , McOsker, M. , Kreimer, D. , Daugherty, M. and Dopke, J. (2026), A model carbonized papyrus roll opens a novel path to identifying readable rolls of the Herculaneum Library, PLoS One, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=960433 (Accessed September 22, 2026)

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