“To read one was to destroy it. Hundreds of rolls have therefore remained sealed, their contents preserved yet unreachable.”
A scroll carbonized by Vesuvius in 79 AD just got read without anyone touching it. X-ray scans and machine learning pulled a full Stoic ethics treatise off a lump of charcoal that would crumble if you opened it. This is the rare case where the AI hype is pointed at something real instead of selling you a chatbot. Two thousand years sealed, and the bottleneck was never the physics. It was that nobody had the patience to map the ink.