Left: Multispectral imaging reveals erased ancient writing. Right: A cross-section of a carbonized scroll from Herculaneum. Illustration by Chad Hagen; Source: Courtesy Owner of the Archimedes Palimpsest (left); University of Kentucky Vis Center (right)

It was a warm day in Paris, and the library of the Institut de France was stuffy and hot. Daniel Delattre, a distinguished French papyrologist, did not remove his suit jacket. The institute, which includes the Académie Française, is a jacket-and-tie sort of place.

Delattre, who is sixty-eight years old and has a dreamy, lost-in-the-vale-of-academe manner, was contemplating a small wooden box on the table in front of him which was labelled “Objet Un.” There are thousands of rare objects in the institute’s library; the fact that whatever was inside the box was Object One suggested that it was of some importance. An ornately hand-lettered card was taped to the outside. It said, in French, “Box containing the remains of papyrus from Herculaneum”—the Roman town destroyed, along with its larger neighbor, Pompeii, in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79.

The papyrus scrolls of Herculaneum, which were discovered in 1752, have long fascinated and frustrated lovers of antiquity. They were found in an elaborate villa buried almost ninety feet deep by the volcano—this archeological wonder has been known ever since as the Villa dei Papiri. At least eight hundred scrolls were uncovered; they constitute the only sizable library from the ancient world known to have survived intact. Some were found stacked on shelves in a small room; others were elsewhere in the villa, packed in capsae, travelling boxes for the scrolls, presumably in preparation for flight.

Given the splendor of the villa, and the masterly bronze sculptures found in its ruins, the learned world assumed that the library would contain vanished classics. One could dare hope for one or two of the lost histories of Livy, of whose hundred and forty-two books on the history of Rome only thirty-five survive. Or perhaps one of the nine volumes of verse written by Sappho, the Greek poet; only one complete poem remains. By some estimates, ninety-nine per cent of ancient Greek literature has been lost, and Latin has not fared much better. Among those works we know are missing are Aristotle’s second volume of the Poetics, which was on comedy; Gorgias’ philosophical work “On Non-Existence”; the four missing books of the Roman historian Tacitus’ Annals, covering Caligula’s reign and the beginning of Claudius’; Ovid’s version of “Medea”; and Suetonius on the Greek athletic games. (His “Lives of Famous Whores” also, sadly, has not survived.) Greek tragedy has been decimated. According to the Suda, the tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia of classical culture, Euripides wrote as many as ninety-two plays; eighteen survive. We have seven each from Aeschylus and Sophocles, who wrote about ninety and a hundred and twenty, respectively. “And that’s just the big three of tragedy,” the writer and classics professor Daniel Mendelsohn told me. “Of the thousand that were likely written and performed during the hundred-year heyday of tragedy, we have only thirty-three extant plays—that’s about a three-per-cent survival rate.”

Delattre’s dream has been to recover something of the lost works of Epicurus (341-270 B.C.), the Greek philosopher whose thought has been the focus of his life’s study, and whose writings are known only through secondary sources.

“Basically, whatever your specialty is, that’s what you want to find in the scrolls,” David Sider, a professor of classics at N.Y.U. and the author of “The Library of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum” (2005), told me.

But that’s the problem. In trying to read the scrolls, scholars and curators have invariably damaged or destroyed them. The Herculaneum papyri survived only because all the moisture was seared out of them—uncharred papyrus scrolls in non-desert climates have long since rotted away. In each scroll, the tightly wrapped layers of the fibrous pith of the papyrus plant are welded together, like a burrito left in the back seat of a car for two thousand years. But, because the sheets are so dry, when they are unfurled they risk crumbling into dust.

During the past two hundred and fifty years, an array of methods and materials have been used on the easier-to-unwrap scrolls, including rose water, mercury, “vegetable gas,” sulfuric compounds, and papyrus juice—most of which have caused grievous harm to the delicate plant material on which the text is inscribed. Scores of scrolls have been badly damaged or destroyed, ruined by the same uniquely human impulse that went into making them—the desire to read.

Before addressing Objet Un, Delattre opened another box, containing pieces of two scrolls (the institute has six altogether) that had suffered a misguided attempt to read them in 1985. There were hundreds of fragments, organized within a set of smaller boxes. They resembled scraps of dried mud. But if you looked closely you could see tiny Greek letters on the warped surfaces, made by a scribe two thousand years ago—an electrifying jolt of handwritten human communication from the ancient world.

Delattre explained that the two ill-fated scrolls had been transported to Naples, where they were treated with a mixture of ethanol, glycerin, and warm water, which was supposed to loosen the folds. One scroll was peeled apart into many fragments; the other dried up and then, like a disaster in slow motion, split apart into more than three hundred pieces. “Well,” Delattre murmured, “it simply exploded.” He shook his head sadly.

How did the institute come by six scrolls in the first place? Delattre explained that, by 1800, the Herculaneum scrolls had become instruments of diplomatic and political power. In 1802, Ferdinand, the Bourbon king of Naples and Sicily, “gave” six of the scrolls to Napoleon, who was threatening to invade Naples. Napoleon housed them in the Institut de France, which he reorganized in 1803 into what would later become the five academies that form the institute today. The collection grew around the scrolls; that’s why the box Delattre showed me was labelled “Objet Un.” But the scrolls did not satisfy Napoleon for long; capitalizing on victory in the Battle of Austerlitz, France invaded Naples in 1806, forcing Ferdinand and his court to flee to Sicily, leaving the scrolls in nearby Portici, where they were housed in a royal museum. When Britain helped restore Ferdinand to the throne, in 1815, he was so grateful that he is rumored to have bestowed eighteen scrolls on the British Prince Regent, later George IV, who in turn gave the Neapolitan court eighteen live kangaroos from the British colony of New South Wales. Some of these scrolls ended up in Oxford, but a few are still unaccounted for. The fate of the kangaroos is even less clear.

Delattre placed his hands on the box containing Objet Un. But he did not open it. He prepared his guests for the worst—the shock of seeing the body in the morgue. When he finally lifted the lid, you saw why. Swaddled in thick cotton was what appeared to be a human turd.

One glance at the scroll was enough to be sure there was no hope it could ever be unwrapped physically. But what about virtually?

Herculaneum was situated on the southwestern flank of Vesuvius, closer to the volcano than Pompeii, to the southeast, and it was destroyed in a different way. Pompeii was slowly buried under falling pumice and ash, carried by the prevailing wind for several days, while Herculaneum was flash-seared by volcanic phenomena called pyroclastic flows and surges—successive waves of superheated gas and rock that overtook the city rapidly, eventually sealing everything under a deep layer. In a famous letter to Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, who witnessed the eruption from across the bay, at Misenum (his uncle, the naturalist and philosopher Pliny the Elder, died in the catastrophe), described seeing “a horrifying dark cloud, ripped by sudden bursts of fire, writhing back and forth.”