"The estate's library was stocked with texts by prominent thinkers of the day. (...) The 1,800 scrolls were found some 260 years ago buried in the Villa dei Papiri in the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum, which was destroyed alongside Pompeii in the catastrophic eruption. Though the scrolls survived, volcanic gases carbonised the papyrus, making them extremely brittle. Attempts to unroll the scrolls would cause them to crumble. (...) The technique they have used is X-ray phase-contrast tomography. This monitors the changes in the phase -- that is, the speed -- of an X-ray beam as it passes through material. When the radiation beam passed through the ink, the change was faint, but detectable. (...) The team believes this is a good first step into one day reading these scrolls more fully, since the experiment was intended merely as a proof of concept, and can be fine-tuned -- perhaps using the more sensitive grating interferometry imaging technique rather than XPCT. "The impact of our discovery that XPCT can read writing inside carbonised papyrus rolls reaches far beyond the study of one particular Herculaneum papyrus. It holds out the promise that many philosophical works from the library of the Villa dei Papiri, the contents of which have so far remained unknown, may in future be deciphered without damaging the papyrus in any way," the team concluded." http://www.cnet.com/news... - Amira

"Anybody who focuses on the ancient world is always going to be excited to get even one paragraph, one chapter, more," says Roger Macfarlane, a classicist at Brigham Young University in Utah. "The prospect of getting hundreds of books more is staggering." Most of the scrolls that have been unwrapped so far are Epicurean philosophical texts written by Philodemus—prose and poetry that had been lost to modern scholars until the library was found. Epicurus was a Greek philosopher who developed a school of thought in the third century B.C. that promoted pleasure as the main goal of life, but in the form of living modestly, foregoing fear of the afterlife and learning about the natural world. (...) "Regardless of the individual text, the library is a unique cultural treasure, as it is the only ancient library to survive almost entire together with its books," he says. "It is the library as whole that confers the status of exceptionality." http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history... - Amira