Papyri, the forerunner of modern paper, is sheets of laminated material made from thin strips of the Cyprus Papyrus plant.

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They then applied it to previously illegible manuscripts called the Oxyrhynchus papyri, which were discovered in an ancient rubbish dump in Egypt.

ECONOMIST: Monitor

Classicists at Oxford first deployed the technique in 1999, to examine papyri discovered in a villa that was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD.

ECONOMIST: Monitor