Twenty years ago, Brigham Young University engineers and classical scholars pioneered the use of multispectral imaging technologies to read ancient documents, including the charred and fragile Herculaneum papyri. In the case of the Herculaneum papyri, which were carbonized and buried by the same eruption that destroyed the ancient city of Pompeii in AD 79, the BYU team had miraculous results. Black ink on blackened pages of papyri suddenly became readable, to the amazement of scholars. The BYU images would lead to dozens of new publications and forever changed the world of papyrology.
