TY - CONF A1 - Bonnerot, Olivier A1 - Del Mastro, G. A1 - Hammerstaedt, J. A1 - Mocella, V. A1 - Rabin, Ira A2 - Capasso, M. A2 - Davoli, P. A2 - Pellé, N. T1 - XRF Ink Analysis of Selected Fragments from the Herculaneum Collection of the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli T2 - Proceedings of the 29th lntemational Congress of Papyrology, Lecce 28 July-3 August 2019 N2 - Hundreds of papyrus rolls, carbonized during the 79CE eruption of Mount Vesuvius, were discovered in 1754 at Herculaneum. Sophisticated mechanical methods for unrolling the best-preserved scrolls have been applied, with varying success. However, such processes have been abandoned, to prevent risk from irremediable damage or loss and to preserve the integrity of the extremely fragile rolls. Following the development of X-ray based non-invasive techniques, attempts to virtually unroll the scrolls were made. The most common ink in Antiquity was carbon-based, and the main element of carbonized papyrus is carbon, making these investigations difficult. However, some attempts with synchrotron X-ray phase-contrast tomography (XPCT) were successful. Recently, the identification of antique inks containing metals raised hope that if some of the inks contain metal the rolls can be virtually unrolled using conventional CT- technique. We investigated the inks of a selection of partially unrolled fragments stored at the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli with X-ray fluorescence in order to select the best candidates for tomography. Despite the many difficulties (analysis of several layers sticking together, letters barely visible, difficulty to separate contribution from the ink and from the papyrus, inhomogeneity of the support, fragility of the fragments…), encouraging results were found, with a number of inks from Greek fragments found to contain additions to the soot (Fe, Pb, Cu P). PB - Centro di Studi Papirologici dell’Università del Salento CY - Lecce KW - XRF KW - ink KW - Herculaneum KW - papyrus PY - 2022 UR - https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-bam/frontdoor/index/index/docId/54756 AN - OPUS4-54756 UR - http://siba-ese.unisalento.it/index.php/29th_ICP/issue/view/1881 SN - 978-88-8305-177-7 SP - 200 EP - 213 AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany