Investigating Herculaneum papyri: An innovative 3D approach for the virtual unfolding of the rolls

After the first recent attempts at virtually opening and reading Herculaneum papyri, a new enhanced method for virtual unfolding and peeling of ancient unopened papyrusrolls has been developed. This new algorithms-based and semi-automatic procedure allowed to investigate with high resolution the3D internal structure of two ancient papyrus rolls formerly analysed by X-ray phase-contrast tomography. Through a new rendering procedure, selected regions inside the rolls could be identified and isolated and the different sheets could be peeled one by one virtually, all without damaging these very precious manuscripts. Subsequently, tracesof possible text were identified on the single sheets. Finally, by applying an additional flattening procedure we restored for the first time several extensive textual portions of Greek, the largest ever detected so far in unopened Herculaneum papyrus rolls, with different degrees of resolution and contrast.