Computer scientist Brent Seales joins Vail Symposium on Feb. 9

Indecipherable for two millennia, ancient scrolls buried in volcanic ash are finally revealing their mysteries thanks to 21st-century technology. On Feb. 9, at Vail Interfaith Chapel, computer scientist Brent Seales joins Vail Symposium to share how tech is helping us read the past.

“This is a fascinating confluence of digital and analog worlds,” Vail Symposium Executive Director James Kenly said. “Cutting-edge technology can now reveal historical documents that add context to our understanding of human development. Brent Seales illuminates how science collaborates with the humanities to bring new perspectives to religion, conflicts and culture.”

The Herculaneum scrolls represent the only intact library known from the classical world, an unprecedented cache of ancient knowledge. Most classical texts we know today were copied — and were therefore filtered and distorted — by scribes over centuries but these works came straight from the hands of the Greek and Roman scholars themselves. Unfortunately, the tremendous volcanic heat and gases spewed by Vesuvius carbonized the scrolls, turning them black and hard. Attempts to open some of the scrolls created a mess of fragile flakes that yielded only brief snippets of text. Hundreds of the papyri were therefore left unopened, with no realistic prospect that their contents would ever be revealed … until now. Progress over the past decade in digitizing and analyzing text found in cultural objects (inscriptions, manuscripts, scrolls) has led to new methods for reading the “invisible library.”

---

---

This presentation explains the development of non-invasive methods, showing results from restoration projects on Homeric manuscripts, Herculaneum material and Dead Sea scrolls. Premised on “virtual unwrapping” as an engine for discovery, the presentation culminates in a new approach that may indeed be the pathway for rescuing still-readable text from some of the most stubbornly damaged materials, like the enigmatic Herculaneum scrolls.

About the speaker:

---

---

Brent Seales is the alumni professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky. His research program applies techniques in imaging and visualization to damaged heritage materials such as manuscripts and inscriptions.

Seales and his research team received international acclaim after extracting text from within a damaged ancient scroll using software for virtual unwrapping based on micro-CT scans. The scroll, which was excavated at En-Gedi in 1972 and was too damaged to be physically opened, is now known to be the only biblical scroll ever to be found within an excavated synagogue. The recovery of readable Hebrew text — identified as the book of Leviticus — from within the still-unopened scroll, was recognized by Christianity Today magazine as the most significant discovery in biblical archaeology of 2015.