Powerful x-ray technique reveals letters and words on two fire-damaged scrolls from Herculaneum and provides clues to the author of oneAncient scrolls that were burned black and buried in ash from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius nearly two thousand years ago have begun to give up their secrets.
Researchers in Italy used a powerful x-ray procedure to read out the first words from two of the Roman scrolls,which belong to the only library to have survived from the ancient world. The papyrus scrolls are among hundreds discovered in 1754 that made up an entire library in a small room of a enormous villa in Herculaneum, a Roman city that was destroyed alongside Pompeii when the volcano erupted.
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Source: theguardian.com