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Leaded ink makes a burned lab papyrus readable on tomography

A PLOS One paper reports a modern Egyptian papyrus written with soluble lead-salt ink, carbonized, then virtually unrolled by laboratory X-ray tomography. Berkeley News says lead absorbs up to 25 times the X-rays of charred papyrus and that ink at 25 micrograms per square centimetre was visible.

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A carbonized papyrus roll in a laboratory tomography gantry under a cool X-ray fan, no readable writing.

A model scroll, not a new Herculaneum read

The peer-reviewed PLOS One paper reports a modern Egyptian papyrus, written with a soluble lead salt ink, carbonized, then virtually unrolled by laboratory X-ray tomography; handheld XRF still saw lead after charring. This is a model scroll, not a newly read Herculaneum volume. The authors built the roll to vary ink recipes, including leaded inks, as ground truth for text-detection algorithms. They argue it is a first confirmed proof of concept that lead in Herculaneum ink would raise the chance of a successful read; carbon-only ink remains the harder baseline. Whether surviving Herculaneum inks actually carry enough lead for that screen is untested here.[1]

Tiny lead still lights up the scan

Berkeley News says a 16 September 2026 PLOS ONE paper by Douglas Seiler and colleagues shows even tiny lead in ink makes carbonised papyrus readable on X-ray CT, and a handheld XRF scanner can flag those scrolls. Seiler's team wrote on modern papyrus with lead-spiked ink, burned the scrolls, and found that lead absorbs up to 25 times the X-rays of charred papyrus. NIST's Jacob LaManna rotated a charred scroll in a beam. Ink at 25 micrograms per square centimetre was visible. Retired Berkeley chemists David Kreimer and colleagues helped mix lampblack inks.[2]

The screen is a hypothesis about ancient ink

PLOS One supplies the controlled carbonized roll; Berkeley News supplies the 25-fold X-ray contrast and the 25 micrograms per square centimetre visibility figure. Together they argue for screening Herculaneum scrolls with XRF before a virtual unroll. They do not claim that a specific ancient library roll has now been read.[1], [2]

References

  1. News sourcePLOS OneA lab-carbonized papyrus with leaded ink unrolls under laboratory X-rays↩1↩2
  2. News sourceBerkeley NewsLead-ink papyrus letters stand out on lab X-ray scans↩1↩2
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