It was placed in a specially made case and taken to Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire.
Inside this huge machine, which is called a synchrotron, electrons are accelerated to almost the speed of light to produce a powerful X-ray beam that can probe the scroll without damaging it.
“It can see things on the scale of a few thousandths of a millimetre,” explained Adrian Mancuso, director of physical sciences at Diamond.
The scan is used to create a 3D reconstruction, then the layers inside the scroll – it contains about 10m of papyrus – have to be identified.
“We have to work out which layer is different from the next layer so we can unroll that digitally,” said Dr Mancuso.
After that artificial intelligence is used to detect the ink. It’s easier said than done – both the papyrus and ink are made from carbon and they’re almost indistinguishable from each other.
So the AI hunts for the tiniest signals that ink might be there, then this ink is painted on digitally, bringing the letters to light.
