Ancient scrolls buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted in Italy in AD 79 spent some time in a Richland hospital room on Wednesday.

Edward Iuliano helped to bring the scrolls to town.

The director of MRI and radiology at Kadlec Medicl Center watched a TV documentary years ago about efforts to read the ancient scrolls and the story stuck with him.

This week, Iuliano is using his expertise to scan fragments of the charred scrolls in hopes of discovering what they say.

"I think it would be just fascinating to get a glimpse of the people (of that era through) what is written," he said.

The papyrus scrolls were discovered more than 200 years ago in a villa in what was the Roman town of Herculaneum. The town was buried along with the more famous city of Pompeii when Vesuvius erupted.

The scrolls make up the only surviving library from antiquity, Iuliano said. Scholars have been able to unfold and read some of them, but others are like charcoal bricks.

Iuliano had the idea of using Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or MRI, to differentiate between the layers of those heavily damaged scrolls without having to handle them.

He also hoped to distinguish the ink from the papyrus.

He eventually connected with Brent Seales, a professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky, who's developing software and hardware to allow for that kind of virtual archeology. They agreed to work together.

Seales has been working with scroll fragments on loan from the Sorbonne university in Paris, and Iuliano got a look at them this week.

Two fragments were brought to the hospital to be scanned Wednesday night.

The larger one was about the size of a notecard and looked like it would crumble if you touched it. The other one was even smaller and had some sharp, clear Greek lettering on it.

Iuliano placed it in the MRI machine.

As he waited for results, he joked the scroll could be an ancient grocery list or silly novel. But even those things would shed light on people back then in a way artifacts like bowls or jewelry never could, he said.

"Gold jewelry is great, but we have gold jewelry now. It doesn't tell you about the person who wore it," said Iuliano. "This kind of text gives us a window into the ancient world."

The fragments also were scanned Wednesday at Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, which is at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland.

More scans are planned today.