美国国家公共电台 NPR Ancient Greek Scroll's Hidden Contents Revealed Through Infrared Imaging（在线收听）

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

More than 200 years ago, scholars preserved the remains of an ancient scroll by gluing them onto cardboard.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

Now this seemed like such a great idea, Audie, except there was writing on the back of the papyrus. Whoops.

CORNISH: But wait. As NPR's Merrit Kennedy reports, there's new work showing what's been long concealed.

MERRIT KENNEDY, BYLINE: This scroll came from a library near Mount Vesuvius. And it was caught in the famous eruption of that volcano nearly 2,000 years ago, the same eruption that buried the city of Pompei. The scroll doesn't look like much now. It's blackened and in tatters. In fact, it looks kind of like what you'd find at the bottom of your barbecue. But the same processes that charred the scroll also preserved it, according to papyrus scholar Graziano Ranocchia from the Italian National Research Council.

GRAZIANO RANOCCHIA: Unless Vesuvius erupted, they would have never survived.

KENNEDY: The scroll was discovered and painstakingly unrolled in 1795. To preserve the fragments, the scholars glued them to cardboard.

RANOCCHIA: And it has been impossible to detach them from it it since then.

KENNEDY: this papyrus is unusual because it has writing on the front and back. It's thought to be a rough draft of a history of the academy founded by the philosopher Plato written by another philosopher, Philodemus. The research team used infrared imaging to finally see some of what's concealed on the back. What they found are bits of text that Philodemus wanted to insert into his book, like quotes from other sources he was considering using in the history.

Classicist Kilian Fleischer is putting together a new edition of Philodemus's history using these images. He says their research had an interesting byproduct - it also made it easier to read the front of the scroll.

KILIAN FLEISCHER: It was a bit like Columbus went out to find India but ended up in America.

KENNEDY: They were also able to identify places where the text was misread before. For example, scholars had previously read the Greek word for charmed, but the new imaging showed it actually said enslaved. Fleischer says that being able to more clearly see the text can bring new, hard facts to ancient history. Merrit Kennedy, NPR News.