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BigPapaSmurf
SFN Die Hard
3192 Posts |
 Posted - 08/03/2005 : 11:46:39
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New technique for reading worn stone inscriptions.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8800217/
quote:
Much of what ancient scribes carved in stone is lost to weathering. Among the hard-to-read are tablets from Draco, a rather severe politician who codified the laws of ancient Athens.
A new technique promises to reveal these and other stone scribblings using X-rays.
Scientists figure there are at least half a million Greek and Latin inscriptions on stones in various states of decay and legibility.
quote:
The group built a machine that generates X-rays a million times more intense than what the doctor uses to image your bones. An X-ray beam is fired at a stone, scanning back and forth. Atoms on the stone's surface emit lower-energy fluorescent X-rays, and different wavelength emissions reveal zinc, iron and other elements in the stone.
Historians know that iron chisels were commonly used to inscribe stone, and the letters were usually painted with pigments containing metal oxides and sulfides. So where letters and numbers are no longer visible to the eye, the newfound minerals trace their shapes.
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"...things I have neither seen nor experienced nor heard tell of from anybody else; things, what is more, that do not in fact exist and could not ever exist at all. So my readers must not believe a word I say." -Lucian on his book True History
"...They accept such things on faith alone, without any evidence. So if a fraudulent and cunning person who knows how to take advantage of a situation comes among them, he can make himself rich in a short time." -Lucian critical of early Christians c.166 AD From his book, De Morte Peregrini |
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