The first overview of the burning scroll after 2000 years

The burning was “passed” badly from the Romanian town of Herculaneum, which provides the first appearance inside for 2000 years.

The document, which looks like a mass of charcoal, was searched by the volcanic explosion of the Vesovius Mountain in 79ad, which is very fragile so that it cannot be opened physically.

But now scientists have used a mixture of x -ray and artificial intelligence to almost cancel its nullification, and they reveal rows and columns of the text.

More work is needed to make passing completely read to break its contents, but the team behind the project says the results are very promising.

Stephen Parsons, the pioneer in the Vesuvius challenge project, said an international competition trying to open Hercules manuscripts.

Some messages are already clear in the old text and the team believes that it has done a philosophy.

Hundreds of wrapped rolls were discovered in Hercules, which were buried like her neighbor Pompeii under meters of volcanic ash.

In the past, some documents, which are manufactured by a thick paper -like material called papyrus, were open but collapsed in cutting.

The Bodlian Library at the University of Oxford has many rolls. It is believed that it is not readable, as they left without touching it for decades.

“We have never been convinced of any of the techniques that were safe enough or effective enough to get any information from the manuscripts,” explained Nicole Gillroi, head of the preservation of books.

But the promise to solve high technology prompted the team to get one of the precious manuscripts of storage.

It was placed in a specially made and transferred to the source of diamonds in Oxfordshire.

Inside this huge machine, called Synchrotron, electrons are almost speeding the speed of light to produce a strong X -ray beam that can investigate the scroll without damaging it.

“You can see things on a few thousand millimeters,” said Adrian Mankoso, Director of Physical Sciences at Diamond.

The survey is used to create a 3D reconstruction, then the layers inside the scroll – which contain about 10 meters of papyrus.

“We have to know the layer that differs from the next layer so that we can cancel it digitally,” said Dr. Mankoso.

Then artificial intelligence is used to detect ink. It is easier to say than do it – both papyrus and ink are made of carbon and almost unable to distinguish from each other.

So artificial intelligence is looking for the smallest signals that may be ink there, then this ink is drawn digitally, which illuminates the letters.

“We can say that the entire pass is full of text,” said Stephen Parsons.

“Now we can work to make it appear more clearly. We will move from a few words to really large clips.”

Last year, the Vesuvius Challenge team managed to read about 5 % of the other Hercules passes.

Its topic was the Greek philosophy of Epicurean, which knows that loyalty could be found through the fun of daily things.

Bodleian's passing on the same topic – but the Vesuvius team calls for more human ingenuity and computing to see if this is the case.

For Nicole Gillroy, the work provides a link to the past.

She said: “I love this relationship with everyone who gathered them, who wrote them, who rolled those wraps and put them on the shelves. There is a real human side to think it is really precious.”