Making the Invisible Visible

We often encounter written artefacts whose central feature we cannot see: the content. There may be various reasons for this. Writing materials were often scarce and expensive, so discarded manuscripts were commonly reused by first erasing and then overwriting the content they initially contained. We know such ‘palimpsests’ from numerous manuscript cultures. In other cases, earlier writing was not replaced by new writing, but has faded, been damaged, or deliberately removed. Moreover, there are also written artefacts that we will never see with the naked eye because, like many cuneiform tablets from ancient Mesopotamia, they are hidden in envelopes that we cannot open.

In all these cases, researchers have the desire to make the invisible visible, that is, read the hidden texts. In the past, chemical reagents were sometimes used on palimpsests that permanently damaged the objects or the envelopes of clay tablets were cracked open – practices that have been abandoned for ethical reasons. Thanks to rapid technical progress in the field of modern imaging techniques, artificial intelligence, and X-ray tomography and fluorescence spectroscopy, it is nevertheless possible today to reveal the secret of numerous written artefacts using non-invasive methods. This way, researchers can recover texts that have not been read for decades, centuries, or even millennia.