Herculaneum papyri epicurus biography

X-ray scans and AI have meant the inside of ancient scroll can be revealed. A badly burnt scroll from the Roman town of Herculaneum has been digitally "unwrapped", providing the first look inside for 2, years. The document, which looks like a lump of charcoal, was charred by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD and is too fragile to ever be physically opened.

But now scientists have used a combination of X-ray imaging and artificial intelligence to virtually unfurl it, revealing rows and columns of text. More work is needed to make the scroll fully legible to decipher its contents, but the team behind the project say the results are very promising. The ancient scroll was burnt to a crisp by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

Herculaneum papyri text

Some letters are already clearly visible in the ancient text and the team believes it's a work of philosophy. Hundreds of carbonised scrolls were discovered in Herculaneum, which like its neighbour Pompeii was buried beneath metres of volcanic ash. In the past, some of the documents, which are made from a thick paper-like material called papyrus, were prised open but they crumbled into pieces.

The University of Oxford's Bodleian Library holds several of the scrolls. Thought to be unreadable, they had been left untouched for decades. But the promise of a hi-tech solution prompted the team to get one of the precious scrolls out of storage. Diamond Light Source used X-ray imaging to see inside the scroll. It was placed in a specially made case and taken to Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire.

Inside this huge machine, which is called a synchrotron, electrons are accelerated to almost the speed of light to produce a powerful X-ray beam that can probe the scroll without damaging it. The scan is used to create a 3D reconstruction, then the layers inside the scroll - it contains about 10m of papyrus - have to be identified.