Historic parchment manuscripts that are too fragile to be unfolded, such as parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, could soon be read without being opened using a scanning technique that relies on the world’s brightest light.

British scientists have already used the Diamond Light Source, a £370 million facility near Didcot in Oxfordshire that shines 10 billion times more brilliantly than the Sun, to decipher the contents of several parchment documents without unfolding them.

The research team, led by Professor Tim Wess of Cardiff University, is now preparing to use the technique for the first time to read documents that are so damaged that curators have never dared to unfold them.

The National Archives have given Professor Wess access to several 18th century documents damaged by fire at the Drury Lane records office in London, the contents of which are unknown as the parchment has been deemed too fragile to be opened.

If the system works, it could eventually be used to decipher unopened parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the collection of about 900 ancient Hebrew parchments discovered in 11 caves.

Within three to four years, the technique should even become capable of imaging the pages of unopened books. This will allow the team to make facsimiles of documents such as original scores by Mozart and Beethoven, which have been seriously damaged by the ink in which they are written.

Professor Wess told the science festival that the X-ray tomography technique was originally developed to analyse the degree of damage that parchment manuscripts have suffered, as collagen in the animal skin turns to gelatin to make the documents brittle when dry and jelly-like when damp. It has now been refined so that the Diamond light beam can actually image words through the parchment.

“The big question is, what can we do to retrieve information from these documents, and we now have proof of the principle from real folded parchments,” Professor Wess said.

“We use X-ray tomography to see what’s inside the document. It allows us to unravel secrets in documents too scarred to open or beyond the skills of conservation. When we see this working, it is a revelatory moment.”

The technique works much like a medical computed tomography (CT) scan. The target manuscript is placed in the Diamond beam, and turned slowly so that the images taken can be built up into a three-dimensional scan. The ink, particularly if it is iron gall ink, which was widely used for writing on parchment, scatters light in a different pattern to the parchment itself.

The Diamond Light Source, which became operational in January, is a synchrotron that generates X-rays 100 billion times brighter than those produced in standard laboratory machines.. The first phase has cost £250 million, paid for by the Government and the Wellcome Trust, and the second phase will cost another £120 million. It is the largest British investment in a science project for 40 years.

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