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.
The ancient scroll, which looks like a lump of charcoal, was scorched 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" as researchers tried to open them, said The Guardian.
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 a 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.
The team is delighted with the initial results. Project leader Stephen Parsons said the researchers were "confident we will be able to read pretty much the whole scroll in its entirety".
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 precious". | 
