Herculaneum scrolls breakthrough: Scientists digitally "unroll" 2,000-year-old 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.