Reading Unopened Scrolls

Guests: Roger Macfarlane, Classics Professor at BYU  Brent Seales, Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Kentucky  The eruption of Mount Vesuvias in 79 AD buried entire cities in volcanic ash. The Roman town of Herculaneum was destroyed, including a tremendous trove of scrolls. The contents of this ancient library are virtually unknown.  “Many of the scrolls were in fact open physically and you can see the writing doing that. The problem is that they are so fragile,” says Seale.  “The images that come from the scanner,” explains Seale, “look more like slicing something on a deli slicer. They don’t give you the flattened surface and that’s where we need to computer science to create that.”  “We’ve been able over the centuries,” says MacFarlane, “to be able to edit complete texts of the Herculaneum papyri.”