Many ancient writings have been lost to us through time and disaster, but now a disaster may return some of those writings to us. Archaeologists are using x-rays to decipher writings recovered from the base of Vesuvus, once thought to brittle to read.

The scrolls are from the Herculaneum, a resort town near Pompeii that was also destroyed by Vesuvius. It contains the only classical library still standing, with almost 2,000 scrolls. There have been previous attempts to unroll the scrolls, but they proved too fragile, so scientists have simply been waiting for a better method. That method is called x-ray phase contrast tomography.

Regular X-rays measure how much of the beam gets through different tissue, but this type of scan uses the slight distortions caused by the x-ray passing through a solid object to make a 3D model of the object. X-rays passing through an object are slightly distorted, or slowed down (a change in the "phase" of the light waves).

NBC news reports, ""The papyri have been burnt, so there is not a huge difference between the paper and the ink," Mocella told Live Science. That made it impossible to decipher the words written in the documents.

"I was in Grenoble for a collaboration, and they explained to me some new developments using phase contrast for science, for palaeontology.... They sounded like exotic applications," he told BBC News.

"And I said, I have another idea. It works very well on some medical applications - particularly mammography - because you're looking at details that have a very similar composition to that of the background," she told the BBC.

"And that's where conventional imaging sometimes fails. What they saw would have been impossible with conventional X-ray imaging.

"What we see is that the ink, which was essentially carbon based, is not very different from the carbonised papyrus," Dr Mocella explained.

"So the letters are there in relief, because the ink is still on the top."

The technique was not without problems, as the papers were not only rolled, but squished together by the force of the volcano. The margin of error was so small that the verticle and horizontal lines in the paper hid some of the letters, making letters with curved lines easier to read.

Mocella writes in the journal Nature Communications, that it will be possible to read complete scrolls with a more powerful x-ray machine called a synchrotron.

"This study, without compromising the physical integrity of the roll, has not merely discovered traces of the ink inside it, but has also helped identify with a certain likelihood the style of handwriting used in the text, along with its author," the authors write.

"It holds out the promise that many philosophical works form the library of the 'Villa dei Papiri', the contents of which have so far remained unknown, may in future be deciphered without damaging the papyrus in any way."