The ancient world guards its secrets well. In the buried ruins of Herculaneum, the many scrolls that make up the library of Philodemus wait to be deciphered. Sadly, the scrolls have been carbonized, and it is extremely difficult to unwind them for normal reading. Daedalus now has an idea.

The nuclear magnetic resonance imager should make it possible to scan such scrolls without unrolling them. Interpreting a scrolled image would take very clever software, but it seems feasible. More problematically, could the best modern machines resolve the lettering? Fortunately, the basic pixel of a coil is curved, like that of a scroll, and also extends in depth, again like a scroll. With luck, a scroll rotated in a superconducting coil, and slowly moved in and out of it, should yield up its lettering to a controlling scholar.

Of course, nobody believes in the Wisdom of the Ancients any more. No matter what amazing statements or beliefs are found in antique libraries, letter files or rubbish dumps, the job of scholars will be to decipher, translate and interpret. Simple letters inviting somebody to a party, or denying an allegation, may be handled most easily; documents claiming to be part of a revelation will give a lot more trouble.

The basic problem, however, is what nucleus to look for in the magnetic-resonance output. Ancient inks were based on soot (carbon), which might have little contrast with the surrounding carbonaceous papyrus or vellum, unless it contains germanium or potassium, from coal or wood. It might be better to examine the vehicle (gum), which would have more hydrogen, and more mobile hydrogen, than the lettering itself. If so, preliminary steaming of the scroll could help. If any of the inks were based on black iron gallate, the signal from paramagnetic iron should be easy to detect. Either way, Daedalus reckons that some sort of contrast change between ink and background could be detected by the instrument and highlighted by its software, enabling a scholar to read the entire scroll without the pain of unwinding it.

Even the problem of dating the find may become tractable, if the changes in the ink, vehicle and substrate turn out to be fairly predictable in time. And if in the future a better method becomes available, why, the scroll is still there, undamaged by clumsy attempts to unroll it.