Mount Vesuvius scrolls, scanned at Richland hospital, still an enigma

What's written on some of the ancient scrolls buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted in Italy in A.D. 79 still is a mystery, despite the best efforts of the director of MRI and radiology at Kadlec Medical Center in Richland.

Dr. Edward Iuliano wasn't able to decipher what they say using various scanning technologies, but the results left him hopeful that may be a possibility in the future.

The extremely fragile papyrus scrolls make up the only surviving library from antiquity. Iuliano performed scans this week on scroll fragments using magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI. He also used a CT scanner and a digital mammography unit, which both use X-ray technology.

"The best results were on the mammography unit," he said.

The scans were done at Kadlec. The badly charred fragments were on loan from the Sorbonne University in France.

Tests to reveal the chemical composition of the ink also were done at the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland. Those results aren't back yet.

Iuliano has been working with a University of Kentucky professor who's developing ways to virtually unwrap and decipher such ancient texts without handling them. Iuliano plans to publish an academic article on the scans and said he wants to keep working on deciphering the scrolls.