Star Wars on Papyrus: Why Scientists Baked Their Own Herculaneum Scrolls to Help Read the Real Ones

The archaeology that intrigues me the most is the kind right at your fingertips, with no way of knowing what it is. I can sit for hours learning about a collapsed civilization, only to end with, ‘We don’t know what happened,’ because the possibilities seem endless. It seems like such a contrast: on the one hand, it’s a civilization, a culture, language, and people that thrived for hundreds of years; on the other, we know next to nothing about them. It reminds us that history can be fragile, and often what we remember is only what was written down.

Now, imagine you found a massive treasure chest: gold, silver, diamonds. You've basically found that cave of sparkling wonders Aladdin goes into, and just like him, you have a conundrum: you can't touch a thing. Why? Because the second you try, it will disintegrate into dust.

That's the predicament scholars for over 200 years have faced as they try to decipher the Herculaneum scrolls. Hundreds of scrolls contain stories, poems, musings, and histories not recorded anywhere else on Earth. But they have been burnt to a crisp, and even the slightest touch can make some of them begin to fall apart.

It's a wealth of knowledge and human history at your very fingertips, and you cannot read it.

Then researchers discovered that a couple of scroll fragments were written with lead ink, which led Douglas Seiler to wonder whether texts containing lead would reveal more than the faintest whispers of writing. But just testing the new idea on an ancient irreplaceable scroll was out of the question. Firstly, because it would be a very expensive failure if their hypothesis turned out not to work, and second, and more importantly, it is an ancient irreplaceable scroll; don't use it as a test guinea pig.

So Seiler and his team created their own scrolls, baked them, and scanned them. The result? The leaded ink shone up to 25 times brighter than the papyrus it was written on.

Baked to a Crisp

The Herculaneum papyri are a collection of hundreds of ancient scrolls that were discovered in 1752 at a grand Roman villa in the ancient town of Herculaneum, just next door to Pompeii. And like Pompeii, it was buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE.

The villa, likely belonging to a member of the wealthy Piso family, contained a massive library of papyrus scrolls, all of which were baked into fragile lumps of charcoal; what makes them so special is that they represent the only known intact library from classical antiquity.

Nearly every other piece of literature we have comes from bits and pieces taken from various libraries and transcribed by hundreds of hands into a multitude of languages over centuries.

Of course, when they first discovered them, people tried to unroll them, which in turn destroyed the irreplaceable writings (which breaks a small part of my archaeological heart). As the decades and eventually centuries rolled on, further attempts were made, such as injecting the scrolls with mercury (don't know how that was supposed to help), painting them with ether, and coating them in papyrus sap to try and soften and separate the layers. Results were mixed, but they did confirm that most of the collection was Greek-language philosophical work by Philodemus, a 1st-century BC Epicurean philosopher.

But for the most part, attempts were destructive; the 1980s attempt to coat one scroll in gelatin/acetic acid let researchers glimpse only a few letters and destroyed more than half of the scroll.

A Breakthrough Occurs

Then in the early 2000s, University of Kentucky computer vision specialist Brent Seales began developing a way to unwrap scrolls virtually rather than physically — capturing 3D images of a scroll's internal layers using X-ray tomography (similar to a hospital CT scan), then digitally unrolling them. The first attempt failed; the resolution wasn't high enough. Over the years, the technique was refined, eventually leading to the use of AI to distinguish the uneven parts that represented ink from those that represented papyrus.

But the Seales team lacked the manpower, time, money, or data to train the AI model on their own. So in 2023 they teamed up with two Silicon Valley financiers to launch the Vesuvius Challenge. The promise was a $700,000 grand prize to the first person to decipher four passages of at least 140 characters each from two of the scrolls. Within just five months, two people working independently managed to figure out the word πορφύραc, Greek for purple.

In 2024, the same team used AI to decipher 15 full columns of a scroll.

The main problem is that carbon ink looks nearly identical to carbonized papyrus on X-ray scans, making deciphering them, even with the advanced AI model, challenging and expensive.

That's why lead matters: unlike carbon, it strongly absorbs X-rays, creating a contrast between the carbon-based papyrus and the lead-based ink that, in theory, should be strong enough for X-ray scanners to detect and for AI to unroll more accurately.

Now they just needed a safe way to test it. That's where Douglas Seiler, a retired real estate/banking entrepreneur turned Berkeley SETI affiliate, comes in. Here's the funny thing: Seiler wasn't even looking for ancient scrolls; he heard about them while helping build a telescope to search for intelligent life, and took up the project on a whim.

Star Wars, Bible Verses, and The Outer Limits

Seiler sourced papyrus and reed pens from Egypt, and traditional lampblack ink from Japan. Then retired Berkeley chemists David and Elena Kreimer helped calibrate how much lead would go into each ink sample, with at least one having no lead as a control.

Next, Seiler paid some high school students and asked the children of some friends to write lines on said papyri using the specially made ink, including bible verses, Star Wars lines, and a quote from the 60s sci-fi show The Outer Limits.

Papyrologist Leah Packard-Grams and Jesse Obert then scanned the newly inscribed scrolls to confirm the lead concentrations used on each. Then Seiler took the scrolls, rolled them up, and stuffed them into his high-temperature furnace in his home lab (because, of course, he had a home lab- who doesn't).

The result was black clumps of scrolls, closely resembling those baked by Mount Vesuvius nearly two thousand years ago.

Then the testing began.

The scroll was sent off to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where it was placed on a rotating X-ray tomography scanner that captured about a thousand images of it. The results were promising; immediately, the lead-spiked ink began to glow against the dark carbonized background.

But bright, random spots with a few discernible letters were not the same as readable text. So the team turned to postdoc Michael Cyrus Daugherty, who had adapted his lithium-ion jelly roll unrolling code to the scrolls.

What is that, you may ask? Well, a battery is much like the Herculaneum scrolls in that, inside it, it is made of thin sheets of material, all layered on top of the other, wound up in a spiral, like the filling in a jelly roll cake, hence the name 'jelly roll'. Manufacturers need to inspect them without cutting them open, but scans show a jumbled mess, just like the scrolls. So they use code that digitally unravels the layers.

It's that code that Daugherty adapted, but instead of unraveling battery jelly rolls, it now unrolls the test scrolls. The result was legible text, and because the researchers already knew what the scrolls said, they could confirm the scans' accuracy, and scrolls like these can now be used to train and test AI models. And the best part: an inexpensive handheld XRF scanner could detect which scrolls had lead and which didn't, so researchers don't accidentally waste time, money, and resources scanning scrolls that never had lead ink anyway.

Just imagine how frustrating that would be: you pick three scrolls because that's all your budget can afford, scan all three, and none have even the hint of lead. At least this way you can prescreen them and scan the most promising scrolls.

If one of the Herculaneum scrolls contains lead in its ink, this could be groundbreaking, making reading just one so much easier than ever. On top of that, it opens up the door for researchers to go into the libraries across Italy, France, and England and use cheap, portable XRF scanners to screen real scrolls for lead content without touching or damaging them, then prioritizing those scrolls with real potential for the more expensive and limited scanning time needed to render them in a readable format.

What I personally find amazing about this is that this ancient wealth of knowledge made up of texts, writings, and teachings no one has been able to read, and no one had ever transcribed, could soon become available to us. It’s a history that was lost not because it was never written down, but because we couldn't read it, and now it may be returned.

These aren't filtered words written down by scribes, monks, and scholars centuries ago, writing in completely different languages. Some of these are the originals, and who knows what they may contain? From grand philosophies to personal stories of daily life, both are equally important in shaping who these people were and what they left behind.

 Had you heard of the Herculaneum scrolls before? And if you could read just one lost text from the ancient world, what would you hope it said?

Let me know what you think, and if you'd like to support this blog and the person writing it, you can chip in once, monthly, or yearly. Only if you'd like to.

References:

Sanders, R. (2026, September 18). To read 2,000-year-old burned scrolls, scientists burn their own. Phys.Org. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-year-scrolls-scientists.html

Seiler, D., LaManna, J. M., McOsker, M., Kreimer, D., Daugherty, M. C., & Dopke, J. (2026). A model carbonized papyrus scroll opens a novel path to identifying readable scrolls of the Herculaneum Library. PLOS One, 21(9), e0353485. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0353485

Vesuvius buried these scrolls. AI is bringing them back. (2026, June 24). History. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/herculaneum-scrolls-mount-vesuvius-ai