Unlocking the Ash: How a Sacrificed Modern Scroll is Helping Scholars Read the Lost Library of Herculaneum
HERCULANEUM, Italy — Nearly two thousand years after the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius buried a Roman library in searing pyroclastic flows, turning hundreds of papyrus scrolls into brittle cylinders of charcoal, modern science has deliberately burned a manuscript to save the past. In a novel study published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, an…
