Infrared imaging techniques for the readability enhancement of Herculaneum papyri: a comparison between technical photography and high-resolution digital microscopy

The Herculaneum papyri, preserved through carbonization by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, represent unique witnesses on ancient Greek philosophy and literature. Despite the exceptional conservation processes resulting from the eruption, the textual readability of these papyri is very hard and often impossible with the naked eye owing to the difficult discrimination of the text made of carbon-black ink from the charred papyrus support. Such complexity is an interesting challenge for both papyrologists and heritage scientists who want to recover the precious works transmitted by them. This is one of the aims of the ERC Advanced Grant 885222-GreekSchools where different research fields collaborate in the analysis and the edition of Herculaneum papyri from different research perspectives. In this project, advanced technologies and philological approaches are applied fin order to classify multiple layers and read the text concealed in them, so achieving a deeper understanding of such manuscripts. This contribution presents an ongoing study on the capability of two different infrared imaging techniques for the analysis and the edition of Herculaneum papyri, namely technical photography and high-resolution digital microscopy. A qualitative comparison between the outcomes obtained through the two techniques is carried out with the purpose of better identifying letters among morphological accidents and classifying different papyrus layers.