An ancient scroll was among the hundreds of the retrieved items from a lavish villa at Herculaneum, one of several Roman towns destroyed when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D. destroying Pompeii. Scientists have now succeeded in reading parts of the ancient scroll that was buried around 2,000 years ago.

The scroll was retrieved from the Villa of the Papyri with a number of texts alraedy deciphered since they were discovered in the 1750s. A number of papyrus scrolls were badly damaged and still remain a mystery. Unrolling the papyrus to read the texts would destroy them whereas previous attempts to peer inside failed to yield any readable texts due to the fact that the ink used in antiquity was made of charcoal and gum making it practically indistinguishable from the burned text.

Vito Mocella, a theoretical scientist at the Institute of Microelectronics and Microsystems in Naples has led a project to try to read the scrolls using a method known as X-ray phase contrast tomography. The same technique had been used to examine fossils without damaging them.

Researchers at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, found they were able to decipher several letters, giving hope that this could be a breakthrough.

It was soon found that the ancient scroll was the work of Philodemus, a poet and Epicurean philosopher, who had lived a century prior to the volcanic eruption. Once this scroll is fully deciphered there are another 700 scrolls waiting in Naples to be read.