ANN ARBOR, Mich. (WOWO) — A rare University of Michigan program is training an international group of scholars in the delicate work of preserving ancient papyrus manuscripts, with the goal of making sure texts that have survived for thousands of years remain available to researchers and future generations.

The University of Michigan’s Papyrus Conservation Summer Seminar brought nine scholars from around the world to Ann Arbor for an intensive, hands-on course focused on the treatment, documentation and long-term care of papyrus according to Bridge Michigan.

According to the Associated Press, the program is the only one of its kind in the Americas and is among only a handful worldwide dedicated specifically to papyrus conservation. The 2026 seminar was held over 10 days in August.

The training gives participants the opportunity to work directly with fragile pieces of ancient writing. Papyrus can deteriorate in several ways: its fibers can break, folds can become permanent, and the ink itself can crumble or smear.

Participants learn how to carefully remove accumulated dirt, sand, salt and other debris. They also learn how controlled moisture can be used to soften folds and realign papyrus fibers, followed by slow drying under light weight to help keep the material flat and prevent it from curling.

The work requires precision because some of the documents being handled may have gone untouched for generations.

Shijin Jiang, a scholar from China who participated in the seminar, described the experience simply: “If you touch this papyrus, you can feel the history.”

That history is particularly significant at Michigan.

The university’s Papyrology Collection contains more than 12,000 papyri and hundreds of texts on other ancient materials, with documents dating from approximately 1,000 B.C.E. to 1,000 C.E. The collection is the largest research and teaching collection of its kind in North America, according to U-M.

The collection includes fragments of major ancient works as well as records that offer a window into ordinary life thousands of years ago. Among its holdings are portions of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, writings associated with the philosopher Epicurus and pages from P46, one of the oldest surviving copies of the Epistles of Paul.

The university says the collection includes everything from personal letters and school exercises to contracts, administrative records, tax documents, wills and marriage agreements.

That breadth is important to researchers because ancient papyri don’t just preserve famous literary or religious works. They also document how ordinary people lived, worked and communicated.

Marieka Kaye, who manages preservation services for physical collections at the University of Michigan Library and teaches the seminar, said working with such material can initially be intimidating.

She said she tries to make the experience “comfortable and not scary,” because many people are understandably nervous about handling artifacts that have survived for millennia.

The conservation seminar has been offered since 2012, generally every other year except during the COVID-19 pandemic. About 50 students have participated over the history of the program, according to the AP.

Giuliano Sidro, curator of Michigan’s Papyrology Collection, said the specialized training is essential because there are so few people with the necessary skills.

“If we don’t train the next generations of conservators, this is a craft that is going to be lost,” Sidro said.

Michigan’s enormous collection also means there is still plenty of potential for discovery.

Some papyri were acquired by the university, while others came from archaeological expeditions to Karanis, an ancient site in Egypt. University expeditions there during the 1920s and 1930s helped build the collection that researchers continue to study today.

The collection’s roots go back to Francis Willey Kelsey, a University of Michigan professor of Latin who helped establish the papyrology collection. Kelsey believed students studying the ancient world should have access not only to books about antiquity but also to physical objects from the ancient world.

Today, those holdings remain an active research resource.

Sidro told the AP that researchers can potentially make discoveries simply by opening a box in the collection’s vault and examining what is inside.

But conservation is only the first step.

Once a fragment is stabilized, scholars must be able to decipher what was written on it. Michigan’s papyri include texts written in ancient Greek, Latin, Egyptian scripts and other languages, including Arabic.

That makes the international nature of the seminar particularly important.

Among the 2026 participants was Arzak Mohamed, an Egyptian scholar and postdoctoral fellow at Macquarie University in Sydney. She grew up in Fayoum, Egypt, near Karanis, and had wanted to attend the Michigan seminar for years.

Mohamed said the knowledge she gained in Ann Arbor could be carried back to both Egypt and Australia.

“Now, I can transfer this information from Michigan to Egypt and even in Australia,” she said. “I will be like the chain, connecting between the three countries.”

She said preserving the manuscripts is ultimately about preserving the information contained within them.

“By saving this information, we can transfer the knowledge to the next generation,” Mohamed said.

The University of Michigan says its papyrus collection continues to be preserved, inventoried and digitized, allowing scholars to study portions of the material without repeatedly handling the fragile originals.

For the conservators being trained in Ann Arbor, the mission is therefore larger than restoring individual pieces of ancient material. It is about maintaining a specialized skill set capable of protecting a written record that reaches back thousands of years — and ensuring those records can still be read long after today’s researchers are gone.