Scientists digitally "unroll" ancient scroll scorched by Mount Vesuvius

London — The Herculaneum scrolls have remained one of the many tantalizing mysteries of the ancient world for almost 2,000 years. Burnt to a crisp by lava from Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, the reams of rolled-up papyrus were discovered in a mansion in Herculaneum — an ancient Roman town near Pompeii — in the mid-18th century. Both towns were decimated by the Vesuvius eruption, and most of the scrolls were so badly charred they were impossible to open.

Over the next two and a half centuries, attempts were made to unfurl some of the hundreds of scrolls using everything from rose water and mercury to vegetable gas and papyrus juice, according to the New Yorker.

The few that could be opened were philosophical texts written in ancient Greek. But most of the scrolls were so badly damaged, they were considered illegible. More recently, researchers managed to decipher some select words using artificial intelligence, X-ray and CT scans to distinguish ink from the papyrus it was printed on.

The mystery is still unravelling, and on Wednesday, a major breakthrough was announced. Researchers say they've now managed to digitally unroll and start reading one of the ancient scrolls. The scroll in question, known as PHerc. 172, is one of three stored at the University of Oxford's Bodleian Libraries in England.

A team involved in the Vesuvius Challenge, a competition offering prize money to anyone who can help unlock the delicate scrolls, says it has virtually unwrapped the papyrus to reveal columns of text that Oxford scholars have already started working to decipher.

"This scroll contains more recoverable text than we have ever seen in a scanned Herculaneum scroll," said Brent Seales, one of the co-founders of the challenge.

"We're confident we will be able to read pretty much the whole scroll in its entirety, and it's the first time we've really been able to say that with high confidence," project lead Stephen Parsons told CBS News' partner network BBC News. "Now we can work on making it show up more clearly. We're going to go from a handful of words to really substantial passages."

The breakthrough came when the team at the Bodleian Libraries brought the blackened scroll to the Diamond Light Source research facility in nearby Oxfordshire, where technicians used a massive machine called a synchrotron to create a powerful X-ray beam that was able to peer into the fragile relic without damaging it.

"It can see things on the scale of a few thousandths of a millimeter," Adrian Mancuso, the facility's director of physical sciences, told the BBC. "We have to work out which layer is different from the next layer so we can unroll that digitally."

Last year, the Vesuvius Challenge announced that three young students had won its $700,000 grand prize for using AI to help researchers read about 5% of another scroll, the subject of which was Greek Epicurean philosophy.

The scroll that the team at the Bodleian Libraries recently unfurled is assumed to be on the same subject.

"I just love that connection with whoever collected them, whoever wrote them, whoever rolled those scrolls up and put them on the shelves," Nicole Gilroy, head of book conservation at the Bodleian Libraries, told the BBC. "There's a real human aspect to it that I just think is really precious."

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