Between 1752 and 1754, an excavation was carried out at the Herculaneum site in Italy. They recovered an astonishing collection of 1,800 scrolls from a house believed to have belonged to the family of Julius Caesar, the Roman dictator who was assassinated in 44BC.
A pair of unopened scrolls from the collection belonging to the Institut de France will be virtually unwrapped using sophisticated technology in the Diamond Light Force, the UK’s national synchrotron science facility, which houses a particle accelerator in which beams travel around a closed-loop path to produce light many times brighter than the sun.
But the digital scan is only the first step in the decoding process. There is a long way to go before a complete recreation of the text is ready.
Nearly 2,000 years ago, Pompeii and Herculaneum were busy wealthy Roman cities located in Campania region in southern Italy. But in 79 AD, the nearby Mount Vesuvius volcano erupted. The ensuing smoke and gas spread 32 km into the air. While the molten lava ravaged the city of Pompeii, a thick blanket of ash entombed the town of Herculaneum.
Herculaneum and Pompeii were basically lost and forgotten until they were rediscovered in 1709 and 1748, respectively.
Picture Credit : Google