A giant X-ray machine in Oxfordshire is going to peer inside unopened manuscripts too fragile to unfurl. Tim Wess from the University of Cardiff has worked out that X-rays from the Diamond synchrotron can be used to image the writing on ancient parchments. Now he wants to look at some of the Dead Sea Scrolls that have so far been deemed too brittle to read, he told the British Association Festival of Science in York (covered by the Daily Telegraph, Times, Daily Mail, Guardian, and the BA). “We’ve folded up a real piece of parchment and then done a process of X-ray tomography on it. We’ve been able to recover the structure where we can see the words that are written inside the document,” says Wess (BBC).

Collagen in animal skins used to write on turns to gelatine when wet, making the documents sticky and hard to read. Drying makes them brittle and equally, if differently, problematic. But iron in the ink used shows up on X-rays and, using computers, different layers of folded or rolled documents can be read. Wess is currently perfecting his technique on documents less valuable than the Dead Sea Scrolls and he believes in three or four years it will be good enough to read text in pamphlets and thin books. Unread works by Beethoven and Mozart would then be accessible (The Daily Telegraph, Times). So far his team has been able to read 80% of the text from 18th century legal documents they have been studying (Guardian).

This is actually the latest development in a great tradition of using X-rays to analyse valuable artefacts. They have previously peered under the surface of paintings to detect images hidden beneath, helped date and conserve sculptures and even detected fraud.

Image: unrolled parchment X-ray / Cardiff University