The ancient Roman resort town Pompeii wasn't the only city destroyed in the catastrophic 79 AD eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. Several other cities in the area, including the wealthy enclave of Herculaneum, were fried by clouds of hot gas called pyroclastic pulses and flows. But still, some remnants of Roman wealth survived.
One palatial residence in Herculaneum contained hundreds of priceless written scrolls made from papyrus, singed into carbon by volcanic gas. It was long believed that these scrolls would never be readable. But now, a massive X-ray microscope at the European Radiation Synchrotron Facility has allowed researchers to see what was written on these ruined documents.
The trick was discovering that the ink used by scribes over 2,000 years ago actually contained fairly large traces of metals, including lead. This came as a surprise to a group of researchers experimenting with the scrolls at the synchrotron, and they subsequently published their discovery in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. These papyri contain the oldest examples of metallic ink in the Greco-Roman world; previously, archaeologists dated the Roman use of metallic ink to the fifth century, though the Egyptians had been known to use it long before. This is a welcome discovery for students of ancient Greco-Roman scrolls, because it means that other scientists can use a technique called scanning X-ray fluorescence (XRF) to see wisps of lead in the outlines of letters.
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