Smith sensed the scroll had great value, and he also suspected the merchant selling the ancient text didn’t recognize its value. Smith purchased the papyrus and returned to buy additional pieces he ...

Burnt to a crisp by lava from Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, the reams of rolled-up papyrus were discovered in a mansion in Herculaneum — an ancient Roman town near Pompeii — in the mid-18th century.

The scroll had been classified as Nabataean, an ancient Arabic dialect, but as Cotton Paltiel studied it, she realized that it was actually written in Greek — and the race began to decipher what the 1 ...