http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/10/hidden-writing-revealed-ancient-scroll-buried-same-ash-pompeii

A section of papyrus is imaged in a mobile laboratory in Italy’s national library in Naples.

More than 2000 years ago, the Greek philosopher Philodemus (or one of his scribes) painstakingly inked a history of the country’s great thinkers, called History of the Academy, on a giant scroll of papyrus. A few decades later, Mount Vesuvius in what is now Italy blew its top, burying Pompeii and the nearby city of Herculaneum, where the scroll was kept, in ash. When archaeologists uncovered the scroll and many of its companions in the 18th century, the fragile rolls were charred and mostly unreadable. “It’s a black cat at midnight situation,” says Greg Bearman, a retired physicist who has studied ancient scrolls.