Despite the thriving trade in manuscripts that occurred throughout the Greek and Roman empires, many plays, poems, and philosophical musings by writers such as Aeschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Sophocles have been lost. Now, a collaboration between Oxford University and Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah, is revolutionizing paleography by rescuing words and images from charred and battered fragments of ancient scrolls.
Paleologists have been experimenting since the 1930s with IR photographs to decipher old paintings and texts. But success with manuscripts was elusive until 1994, when Greg Bearman, a physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an amateur history buff, hit upon the idea of using a space satellite technique called multispectral imaging. Bearman used MSI, in which photographs are taken at different wavelengths, on a badly degraded fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The nearly invisible text showed up clearly at a wavelength of 900 nm. “We...
