Synchrotron light unveils hidden letters inside a carbonized ancient papyrus scroll discovered in Herculaneum

At the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, scientists from Italy, Germany and France have succeeded in 'reading' letters inside a papyrus roll found in the ancient library, discovered in Herculaneum. The experiments were done at the beamline ID17, and the X-ray phase contrast tomography technique was employed. The team was successful in extracting words under several papyrus layers in a fragment, and finally found that they are the complete Greek alphabet. For more information, see the paper, "Revealing letters in rolled Herculaneum papyri by X-ray phase-contrast imaging", V. Mocella et al., Nature Communications, 6, 5895 (2015). An interesting movie has also been uploaded to Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3aWBgNYOCU