Twenty years ago, Brigham Young University engineers and classical scholars pioneered the use of multispectral imaging technologies to read ancient documents, including the charred and fragile Herculaneum papyri. In the case of the Herculaneum papyri, which were carbonized and buried by the same eruption that destroyed the ancient city of Pompeii in AD 79, the BYU team had miraculous results. Black ink on blackened pages of papyri suddenly became readable, to the amazement of scholars. The BYU images would lead to dozens of new publications and forever changed the world of papyrology.
Out of the Ashes: Recovering the Lost Library of Herculaneum, produced in 2003, tells the story of the only library ever recovered from antiquity, and efforts by a worldwide team of scholars to unroll, read and preserve the fragile scrolls.
The documentary was produced by Brigham Young University/KBYU Television for American Public Television. Special thanks to Roger Macfarlane, BYU associate professor of comparative arts and letters, Giovanni Tata, and to Biblioteca Nationale "Vittorio Emanuele III" in Naples, Italy.
In 2023, engineers at the University of Kentucky announced exciting new advancements that will allow the Herculaneum papyri to be read without unrolling them and to decipher the texts using AI. The announcement has sparked a renewed interest in the original Herculaneum documentary, and in BYU's groundbreaking work using technology to study ancient papyri.
