Imaging the carbonized papyri from Herculaneum

Abstract

The only surviving ancient library is preserved in the form of over a thousand papyrus rolls from a large aristocratic villa on the bay of Naples at Herculaneum in Italy, all of them carbonized in the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. An international team of investigators is currently involved in a project to capture digitized images of these papyri. Experimentation using a Kontron digital camera has begun on a roll housed in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. For comparison and control, a collateral project has been undertaken involving imaging of the (non-carbonized) Greek papyri from Oxyrhynchus in the Ashmolean Library and Bodleian, with aim of creating an Oxford bank of digitized images of papyri, in order to facilitate the production of new critical editions and translations of them