Scientists believe they have discovered the technology to read the charred and blackened scrolls left behind after Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79.
Two complete scrolls and four fragments were buried and carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and are too fragile to be opened. They came from the so-called Herculaneum library, the only one surviving from antiquity.
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The documents have been examined by the synchrotron, a particle accelerator in which beams travel around a closed-loop path to produce light many times brighter than the sun.
“The idea is essentially like a CT scanner where you would take an image of a person, a three-dimensional image of a person and you can slice through it to see the different organs,” Laurent Chapon, physical science director of Diamond Light Source, told Euronews.
The experts shine intense light through the scroll to detect images on the other side so they can read it in a non-destructive manner.
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The documents are steeped in history: the villa in which they were found is thought to have been owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, the Roman dictator assassinated in 44 BC.
So academics are naturally thrilled by the news. “The library at Herculaneum was the only library that survived from antiquity and because of that the material inside is extremely valuable,” said Brent Seales, professor of computer science at Kentucky University.
“Texts from the ancient world are rare and precious, and they simply cannot be revealed through any other known process.”
He believes that the scrolls will feature writings about “Greek philosophy around Epicureanism, which was a prevailing philosophy of the day”.
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