A badly burnt scroll from the Roman town of Herculaneum has been digitally "unwrapped", providing the first look inside for 2,000 years.

The document, which looks like a lump of charcoal, was charred by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD and is too fragile to ever be physically opened.

But now scientists have used a combination of X-ray imaging and artificial intelligence to virtually unfurl it, revealing rows and columns of text.

More work is needed to make the scroll fully legible to decipher its contents, but the team behind the project say the results are very promising.

"We're confident we will be able to read pretty much the whole scroll in its entirety, and it's the first time we've really been able to say that with high confidence," said Stephen Parsons, project lead for the Vesuvius Challenge, an international competition attempting to unlock the Herculaneum scrolls.

Some letters are already clearly visible in the ancient text and the team believes it's a work of philosophy.