Scientists burned their own scrolls to unlock a 2,000-year-old mystery

Douglas Seiler went to unusual lengths to recreate an ancient mystery.

He obtained papyrus and reed pens from Egypt, along with traditional lampblack ink from Japan. Then he paid high school students to write on the papyrus using passages from "Star Wars," the Bible, and a quote from the 1960s science fiction television show "The Outer Limits."

Once the writing was finished, Seiler, an affiliate of Berkeley SETI, rolled up the papyrus, sealed it inside a container, placed it in a high-temperature furnace, and burned it until it was thoroughly carbonized.

The experiment was designed to mimic a catastrophe that occurred nearly 2,000 years ago in Herculaneum, an ancient Roman city in Italy. When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 C.E., volcanic ash overwhelmed the city and transformed more than a thousand papyrus scrolls in a local library into fragile, charred remains. The same eruption famously buried nearby Pompeii.