The secrets of a 2,000-year-old burnt scroll

A charred scroll from the Roman town of Herculaneum has been digitally "unwrapped", allowing researchers to peer inside the ancient document after 2,000 years.

One word appears more than once in the text that's been deciphered so far, so experts have already been able to hazard a guess at the document's subject matter.

Crumbling papyri

The ancient scroll, which looks like a lump of charcoal, was charred by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD. It's "too fragile to ever be physically opened", said the BBC. That delicacy was demonstrated when previous papyri "crumbled to dust" when researchers tried to open them, said The Guardian.

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The latest scroll has been taken to a gigantic high-intensity X-ray facility in Oxfordshire, where electrons were "accelerated to almost the speed of light" to produce an X-ray beam powerful enough to "probe the scroll without damaging it", said The Independent.

Artificial intelligence can detect the ink without opening the scroll, although this is "easier said than done", said the BBC, because the papyrus and ink are both made from carbon and are "almost indistinguishable from each other".

When the document was virtually unrolled on a computer, several columns of text were revealed. One word in the Ancient Greek text, διατροπή, means disgust, and appears twice within a few columns.

Human connection

The team are delighted with the initial results. Project leader Stephen Parsons said the researchers are "confident we will be able to read pretty much the whole scroll in its entirety".

Parsons is the head of Vesuvius Challenge, an international competition for experts who are trying to unlock Herculaneum scrolls. Last year, Youssef Nader in Germany, Luke Farritor in the US, and Julian Schilliger in Switzerland, won the competition’s $700,000 (£558,000) grand prize after reading more than 2,000 Greek letters from another Herculaneum scroll.

That scroll is thought to have been written by the epicurean philosopher Philodemus. It "covered sources of pleasure, from music to food", and "explored whether pleasurable experiences" were derived "from the abundant or the scarce", such as the "minor or major constituents of a meal", said The Guardian. It's already thought that the scroll currently being studied in Oxford will cover similar philosophical topics.

Meanwhile, Nicole Gilroy, who supervises scrolls' care at Oxford's Bodleian Library, said she was enjoying "that connection with whoever collected them, whoever wrote them, whoever rolled those scrolls up and put them on the shelves", because "there's a real human aspect to it that I just think is really precious".