Sometimes, it takes a massive volcanic eruption to keep a library intact. When the ancient Roman towns of Herculaneum and Pompeii met their fiery ends at the hands of Mount Vesuvius, the vast quantities of ash and other materials ejected from the volcano preserved nearly everything in the towns for over a millennium. People were instantly killed by the searing heat, their last moments preserved in ash that coated their bodies. Lewd graffiti remained on buildings, bread remained uneaten and in Herculaneum, an entire library of papyrus scrolls was preserved.

A library kept intact is an extraordinarily unusual find. Books and scrolls are fragile, and if some manage to survive the ravages of time, it is usually because individuals moved them from the protective enclosure of one library to another. Finding written words in a collection as it was nearly 2,000 years ago is incredible.

The only problem? These scrolls aren't exactly easy to read. The library was uncovered in 1752 by early archeologists, who found hundreds of charred scrolls like the one pictured above. When Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, the same wave of superheated volcanic material that buried the town also charred the scrolls. Over the past 250 years, many people have tried different methods for reading the handwritten texts, including picking the scrolls apart or trying to unroll the charred papyrus. However, these deciphering techniques often end up destroying the scrolls, ultimately. Back in the 1980s archeologists decided they wouldn't attempt to use any other physical methods for trying to read the scrolls, in the hopes that a future generation might figure out how to read them without obliterating the artifacts. They focused instead on trying to read the papyrus scrolls that had already been unrolled.