Two,000 years later you can get the first glimpse in a scorched scroll

It was placed in a specially made case and carried to a diamond light source in Oxfordshire.

Inside this huge machine called a synchrotron, electrons accelerate to almost the speed of light, producing a powerful X-ray beam that can probe the scroll without causing damage.

“You can see things on a scale of a thousandths of millimeters,” explained Adrian Mankuso, director of the Faculty of Physics at Diamond.

The scan is used to create a 3D reconstruction, then the layers in the scroll – contain about 10m of papyrus – must be identified.

“We need to resolve layers that are different from the next layer, and we can deploy them digitally,” Dr. Mancuso said.

Artificial intelligence is then used to detect ink. It’s easier than that – both papyrus and ink are made of carbon, and they are hardly distinguishable from each other.

So AI hunts for the smallest signal that the ink may be there, and this ink is digitally painted to brighten the letters.