XVII CENTURY GEORGIAN BLACK INK MANUSCRIPT SURFACE STUDY WITH ATOMIC FORCE MICROSCOPY, SCANNING ELECTRON MICROSCOPY, AND ENERGY-DISPERSIVE SPECTROPHOTOMETRIC METHODS

Abstract

This study presents the morphological and elemental analysis of the surface of XVII century Georgian black ink manuscript using Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM), Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and Energy-Dispersion Spectrophotometry (EDS). Scanning electron microscopy (JEOL) obtained surface images of manuscript samples and EDS revealed chemical content of manuscript’s surface in percent. EDS data were collected from 11 different surfaces of manuscript. According to our EDS data, Carbon and oxygen element content mean values (in percent) are 49.28% for carbon and 44.77% for oxygen. Besides those elements, trace elements such as: sulfur, iron, potassium, magnesium, calcium, silicon, aluminum, sodium, and lead were found. The scanning areas of a SEM images were: 50 and 100 micrometers. This work also presents the AFM (Vecco) method. In particular, with this method, microstructures on the ink surface were identified, with a maximum size of 12.87 microns and a minimum of 3 microns. In this study we have not presented structural identification of ink content, which will be conducted in our future research. However, analyzing the data from EDS reveals, that indeed carboncontaining structures have been identified without recognizing specific substances. Georgian black ink sample might be made from burnt wood or a bone that was used as an ink pigment in seventeenth century. Our hypothesis suggests, that our ink sample presented in this study was created from black ink pigment.