Multispectral imaging has 'produced miraculous results' on ancient documents
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OXFORD, England -- The scholars at Oxford University are not sure how it
works or why; all they know is that it does.
A relatively new technology called multispectral imaging is turning a pile
of ancient garbage into a gold mine of classical knowledge, bringing to
light the lost texts of Sophocles and Euripides as well as some early
Christian gospels that do not appear in the New Testament.
Originally developed by NASA scientists and used to map the surface of
Mars, multispectral imaging was successfully applied to some badly charred
Roman manuscripts that were buried during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in
A.D. 79. Examining those carbonized manuscripts under different wavelengths
of light suddenly revealed writing that had been invisible to scholars for
two centuries.
Now scientists are shining the multispectral light on the Oxyrhynchus
Papyri, an enormous collection of texts unearthed from the rubbish heaps of
the vanished city of Oxyrhynchus, about 100 miles south of Cairo.
First excavated by two Oxford archeologists in the late 19th Century, the
hoard of papyrus from Oxyrhynchus has long been a source of fascination and
frustration for scholars: Fascination because it holds some of the lost
masterpieces of classical literature, frustration because much of it is in
such poor condition it's impossible to read.
But the multispectral imaging has "produced miraculous results," according
to Dirk Obbink, a lecturer in papyrology and Greek literature at Oxford who
is directing the project.
"No one knows exactly why it produces the results it does," Obbink said of
the technology. "But with texts that are difficult to read, it's a
night-and-day difference."
In the past few weeks alone, researchers have succeeded in deciphering a
70-line fragment from a lost tragedy by Sophocles and a 30-line fragment
from Archilochos, a Greek soldier-poet who chronicled the Trojan Wars.
The Archilochos fragment confirms what scholars have long suspected: that
the Greeks got lost on their way to invade Troy and mistakenly landed at
place called Mysia. There they fought a battle, lost and had to regroup
before heading off again for Troy.
The Archilochos fragment will be published later this month. The newly
discovered lines from Sophocles are scheduled for publication in August.
High-tech Lazy Susan
"To get a piece like that every 10 years, we think ourselves lucky, so I'd
have to say that this is a very exciting development," said professor
Richard Janko, head of the classics department at the University of Michigan.
Multispectral imaging uses digital cameras equipped with a kind of
revolving Lazy Susan of light filters that isolate the waveband at which
the obscured ink contrasts most vividly with the dark background of the
papyrus, the paper of the ancient Egyptians.
"Some parts [of the writing] respond well to infrared; other parts respond
to something further along the spectrum," Obbink said.
A sequence of images taken at all ranges of the light spectrum are then put
together, and the result often is a document of startling clarity. The
technique for adapting NASA's technology to the reading of ancient
manuscripts was developed at Brigham Young University in Utah, which is
assisting Oxford with the Oxyrhynchus project.
The Oxyrhynchus collection, housed at Oxford University's Sackler Library,
consists of more than half a million scraps of papyrus. Some of it is in
excellent condition, but much of it is worm-eaten and darkened by time.
All of it was collected from the rubbish dumps of Oxyrhynchus, a city that
flourished after the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C.
The city remained prominent in the Roman and Byzantine periods but declined
after the Arab conquest in A.D. 641.
For a thousand years, the inhabitants dumped their trash in the desert.
Over time the dumpsites were covered by sand, and they remained covered
until 1896 when Oxford archeologists Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt began
excavating the area.
At first, Grenfell thought that what he and Hunt had found was "nothing but
rubbish mounds," but they quickly came to appreciate that they had found a
remarkable window into the literary and ordinary lives of the ancients.
There were plays by Sophocles and Euripides, poems of Pindar and Sappho,
and some of the earliest documents recording Christianity's spread to
Egypt.
THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS, FOR EXAMPLE, RECORDS THE "SAYINGS OF JESUS" IN A MANNER THAT SOME SCHOLARS OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY BELIEVE IS MORE AUTHENTIC THAN THE GOSPELS IN THE NEW TESTAMENT.
There also is an abundance of life's everyday stuff and miscellanea--tax
records, marriage contracts, horoscopes, erotic musings, advice on how to
buy a donkey and advice on how to cast a decent magic spell.
"It's as if you took a slice out of everybody's hard drive, or every 10th
page out of every 10th book in the library--what you have is a complete
slice of life," said Obbink, the project director.
The problem was sorting the wheat from the chaff and deciphering scripts
that had been damaged or obscured.
1 percent in a century
Working steadily for more than a century, scholars at Oxford managed to
decipher, interpret and publish about 5,000 text fragments, about 1 percent
of the total collection, according to Nick Gonis, the collection's curator.
Multispectral imaging could help speed the process.
Meanwhile, the Oxford team is looking at another promising application of
the technology. Scholars have long known that the elaborately painted
cartonnage used to encase mummies was a kind of papier-mache made from
papyrus. A lot of the papyrus has writing on it, but there didn't seem to
be a way of reading it without destroying the decorative cartonnage.
In one recent trial, the imaging process was able to read writing beneath
the painted surface of a cartonnage fragment. Scholars were thrilled, even
though it turned out to be just another government report.
More Authentic Than The Gospels?
