Jerash silver scroll In 2015, researchers used virtual unfolding to read an 8th-century silver scroll from
Jerash, Jordan. Unrolling revealed 17 lines of "presumed pseudo-Arabic as well as some magical signs". Such scrolls are known as
lamellae and were used "for writing
magical or apotropaic texts". Before the Jerash scroll, X-ray tomography was used for the Late Antique
Mandaean lead scroll. The Jerash scroll was found in 2015 during the
Danish-German Jerash Northwest Quarter Project excavation; the scroll "was folded, rolled and then placed in a cylindrical lead container". File:41598 2015 Article BFsrep17765 Fig4 HTML.jpg|Silver scroll (above) and lead case (below) after separation by conservator. File:41598 2015 Article BFsrep17765 Fig2 HTML.jpg|Slice showing the folding of the silver sheet. File:41598 2015 Article BFsrep17765 Fig3 HTML.jpg|The scroll rendered in VGStudio MAX 3 Beta with indication of the slice shown File:41598 2015 Article BFsrep17765 Fig5 HTML.jpg|Lines 1–8 from the silver scroll; all back sides, mirrored.
En-Gedi Scroll The
En-Gedi Scroll is an ancient
Hebrew parchment found in 1970 at
Ein Gedi,
Israel.
Radiocarbon testing dates the scroll to the third or fourth century CE although there is disagreement over whether the evidence from the writing itself supports that date. The scroll was discovered to contain a portion of the biblical
Book of Leviticus, making it the earliest copy of a
Pentateuchal book ever found in a
Torah ark. Damaged by a fire in approximately 600 CE, the scroll is badly charred and fragmented and required noninvasive virtual unrolling, which was done in 2015 by a team led by Brent Seales of the
University of Kentucky.
Diss Heywood Manor scroll In 2018,
Cardiff University's group applied virtual unrolling to a 16th-century burned scroll found in the
Diss Heywood Manor in
Norwich, England. The scroll has four sheets of
parchment and was severely damaged by fire. It "contained information on life in the manor and included details on land transactions, disturbances of the peace, payment of fines, names of jurors and information on the upkeep of land". After the unrolling, researchers were able to read the scroll; text confirmed that it "relate to Heywood Hall and that it is a record of the Curia Generalis, the General Court, which usually refers to the Court Leet where peace keeping functions were exercised". Before Diss Heywood Manor scroll, the group applied virtual unrolling to a 15th-century scroll from
Bressingham Manor,
Norfolk. The scroll was damaged by water, could be partially unrolled and became readable. File:Bressingham scroll.png|The 15th century Bressingham scroll, which can only be partially unrolled. The
Herculaneum papyri are more than 1,800
papyrus scrolls discovered in the 18th century in the
Villa of the Papyri in
Herculaneum. They had been
carbonized when the villa was engulfed by the
eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Multiple attempts were made to unroll the scroll mechanistically, and multiple scrolls were destroyed as a result. The internal structure of the rolls was revealed to be too compact and convoluted for the automated algorithms the team had developed. No ink was seen on the small samples imaged, because carbon-based inks are not visible on the carbonized scrolls; In 2015–2016, several research groups have proposed to unroll the scrolls virtually, using
X-ray phase-contrast tomography, possibly with a
synchrotron light source. In 2018, Seales demonstrated a readable virtual unrolling of parts of a Herculaneum papyrus (P.Herc. 118) from the
Bodleian Library, at
Oxford University, which was given by King Ferdinand of Naples to the Prince of Wales in 1810. Seales used a handheld scanner called an Artec Space Spider instead of a tomograph. In the same year, he demonstrated a readable unrolling of another Herculaneum scroll, using the particle accelerator
Diamond Light Source; through an X-ray imaging technique, ink containing trace amounts of lead was detected. They offered a $700,000 grand prize to be awarded to the first team that could extract four passages of text from two intact scrolls using 3D scans. On 12 October 2023, the project awarded $40,000 to
Luke Farritor, a 21-year-old computer student at the University of Nebraska, for successfully detecting the first word in an unopened scroll:
porphyras (). With this milestone "first word" award included, the project has awarded $260,000 in total for segmentation tooling and ink detection (from segmented volumes). On 5 February 2024, the project awarded its 2023 Grand Prize of $700,000 to the winning team and $50,000 each to three runner-up teams for successfully revealing 5% of
one scroll, and announced its goal for 2024 of revealing 90% of the four scrolls that it has fully scanned. The uncovered text is believed to be a previously unknown text of
Philodemus, "centered on the pleasures of music and food and their effects on the senses". As of 2025, the scans of the scrolls that are being provided to participants in the Vesuvius Challenge for the purpose of fully reading them are Scroll 1 (
PHerc. Paris. 4), from the Institut de France, which is 5% read, Scroll 2 (PHerc. Paris 3), from the Institut de France, Scroll 3 (PHerc. 332), from the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, a smaller scroll known as the midollo (marrow), left over from attempts to physically unroll the larger original scroll, Scroll 4 (PHerc. 1667), from the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, similar in size to Scroll 3, and Scroll 5 (PHerc. 172), from the Bodleian Library in Oxford, similar in size to Scroll 1. File:41598 2020 80458 Fig3 HTML.jpg|PHerc.110 image acquired using micro-CT File:41598 2020 80458 Fig4 HTML.jpg|The triangular meshing of PHerc.1103 (a simplified representation of the mesh) File:41598 2020 80458 Fig5 HTML.png|Comparison between different parameterization methods for the digital flattening of a sheet extracted from PHerc. 1103
Chinese soiled bamboo scrolls In 2019, researchers used virtual unfolding on
Chinese bamboo scrolls contaminated by soil. Bamboo scrolls with carbon-based inks were used from Shang to the Jin dynasty. Researchers used modern bamboo scrolls to develop the technique. The scrolls are made from individual bamboo slips rolled together, with writing inside. File:Bamboo scroll scanning.png|The 3-D X-ray CT scanning of bamboo scrolls File:Bamboo scroll proposed digitization pipeline.png|The proposed digitization pipeline File:Bamboo scroll model.png|Reconstructed and rendered soiled Scroll A before and after virtual cleaning File:Bamboo scroll unwrapped.png|A photograph of manually unwrapped and reconstructed scroll
Egyptian papyri In 2017, virtual unfolding was used for Ancient Egyptian
papyri and modern mockups with text written in "very highly absorbent red ink, made from cinnabar and minium". In 2019, the technique was used to study several damaged Egyptian papyri fragments. On one of the fragments, a
Coptic word "Lord" was seen.
Renaissance Europe letterpackets In 2021, researchers used virtual unfolding to read content of unopened letterpackets from Renaissance Europe. Authors also analyzed and classified
letterlocks that often can't be read without a non-damaging method. One unopened letter from 1697 was read: it was "a request from Jacques Sennacques, dated July 31, 1697, to his cousin Pierre Le Pers, a French merchant in The Hague, for a certified copy of a death notice of one Daniel Le Pers". File:41467 2021 21326 Fig2 HTML.png|High-level overview of virtual unfolding showing File:41467 2021 21326 Fig3 HTML.png|Two sample cross sections of XMT data File:41467 2021 21326 Fig6 HTML.png|Virtual unfolding results for unopened letter DB-1627 (a, b) and opened letter DB-2040, showing a XMT-textured image after virtual unfolding File:41467 2021 21326 Fig7 HTML.png|Letterlocking categories 1–64, based on manipulations and assigned security score.
Frankfurt silver inscription The
Frankfurt silver inscription is an 18-line
Latin engraving on a piece of silver foil, housed in a protective
amulet dating to the mid-
3rd century AD. Due to its reference to
Jesus Christ, it represents the oldest known evidence of Christianity north of the
Alps, and from its explicit invocation of
Saint Titus, it is the earliest evidence of the Christian practice and belief of the veneration and
intercession of saints. The amulet was discovered in 2018 during archaeological excavations at a cemetery near the former
Roman town of
Nida, located in the northwestern suburbs of
Frankfurt am Main. During restoration at the , the amulet and silver foil were separated. In 2019, X-ray imaging revealed the presence of an inscription on the inside of the silver foil. The thin, fragile foil could not be unrolled physically, so it was scanned via
computed tomography by the and
Goethe University Frankfurt. A 3D model of the foil was created, enabling virtual unrolling.
Battery degradation research Virtual unrolling technique, developed for damaged scrolls, was adapted and used to virtually unroll
lithium batteries, which gave the researchers a "unique insight into the dynamics of Li transport during charge and discharge".
Mongolian Buddhist scroll In 2025, researchers used virtual unrolling to read a Mongolian Buddhist scroll from the Mongolian collection of the
Ethnological Museum of Berlin, found inside a shrine, or
gungervaa in Mongolian. The shrine was obtained during the 1927–1935
Sino-Swedish Expedition led by
Sven Hedin. The German meteorologist Waldemar Haude "came into possession" of the shrine and gave it to his friend, a Sinologist and Mongolist , the curator of the East Asian collections at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. Three scrolls wrapped in yellow silk were inside the shrine. The scrolls contain
dharanis, Buddhist mantras or prayers. The researchers note that "physical unwrapping and unrolling was not an option for ethical reasons according to international museum standards in conservation". They used synchrotron tomography to create a 3D model, scanning the scrolls at
BESSY 2 in Berlin. Virtual unrolling make it possible to see that the scrolls were written in
Tibetan characters in
Sanskrit. Only one inscription was read, the mantra "
Om mani padme hum". The characters became visible under X-rays because the ink contained some metal phases; authors note that this is unusual because "Chinese ink traditionally consists of a mixture of soot as a black pigment and animal glue as a binding agent". File:Buddhist scroll unwrapping 1.jpg|a) Scroll inside synchrotron X-ray beam at BAMline, BESSY 2. b) reconstructed cross-section of a scroll. Areas that contain metal appear bright, while the paper of the scroll is shown as light gray in color, and air in dark gray. File:Buddhist scroll unwrapping 2.jpg|a) Cross-section of a reconstructed slice. The course for the virtual unrolling needed to be created manually in several slices of the 3D volume. b) Cross-section of unrolled and flattened volume. File:Buddhist scroll unwrapping 3.jpg|Cross-sections and magnification of scroll "I" (a-d), scroll "II" (e-h) and scroll "III" (i-l). File:Buddhist scroll unwrapping 4.jpg|Text is visible in unrolled volume "Om mani padme hum". == Notes ==