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Writing with light to discover the secrets of Herculaneum!

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
We have come full circle in photography. What was about "writing with light. Is now about the light recovering the writing lost!

Amazingly we have only 10% of the most famous ancient greek literary genius for our generation's pleasure! A magnificent Roman seaside villa contained a magnificent library packed with ancient scrolls. A blast of super hot gases from Vesuvious' eruption charred the scrolls in an instant and subsequently the ash petrified them!


Lost Libraries

During Hellenistic Period (323-31BC) there were several major libraries in the Mediterranean world, the greatest being the Library of Alexandria, established about 300BC - it was damaged in 48BC and probably destroyed in the reign of the Roman Emperor Aurelian (270-275AD)

Alexandria's closest rival was the library at Pergamum, in what is now Turkey. The Roman conquest of the kingdom of Macedon in 168 BC led to the seizure of its imperial library, which was taken to Rome.

During the Roman Empire, major libraries were built in Rome, often with separate buildings to hold Latin and Greek works - a catalogue of Rome's buildings from c. 350AD, 60 years before the city was burnt and looted by the Visigoths, lists 29 public libraries in the city, all now lost






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A scroll, likely of Greek Literature as just a twisted charred lump of fragile remains

Now with the aid of spectral camera, in the infra red and also multispectral cameras reading in many wavelengths have turned the charred remind into 2 dimensional texts of amazing clarity. so the art of photography, writing with light, has now elucidating writing that is beyond imagination precious to humanity!

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After unrolling, a feat in itself and multispetcral analysis with computer reconstruction


Read the entire story here!

and Maris Rusis, allow this time that this is real photography at its very best.

Asher
 
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...and Maris Rusis, allow this time that this is real photography at its very best.

Asher

It's absolutely marvellous what has been achieved to date but I think future investigations will be even more stunning. I hope micro-CAT scanning, micro-MRI using nuclei other than hydrogen, ultra high resolution Xray pumped by synchrotron radiation, will allow the mapping of complete text without unrolling scrolls.

All of this exquisite imaging technology would work just as well whether photography had been invented or not. Photography like oil painting or marble sculpture is a perfectly practical way of making images. But it is, like other historic processes, an emanation of a now distant age. Remember: photography was invented in, described in, and works perfectly in a world without electric power of any kind.
 
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