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How do we know what the great ancientVery old. thinker AristotleA student of Plato, tutor to Alexander the Great and the father of political philosophy. thought? The answer is - not easily.

All of his works were lost when the Roman EmpireLasting from 27BC to 476AD, the Roman Empire controlled regions around the Mediterranean in Europe, North Africa and Western Asia. fell. Luckily, ArabArabia includes the countries on the coast of north Africa (from Morocco in the north-west) and the Arabian peninsula. It does not include Iran, which is in Asia but which is the most significant supporter of Shia Islam. writers had translated his works and then brought them to Spain.

Today, expertsSomeone who knows a lot about a particular subject. think only around 1% of the works that we know about written in ancient Greek and Latin have survived.

But for 300 years, we have been sitting on a treasure trove. In HerculaneumAn ancient city that was buried under volcanic ash after the eruption of Vesuvius in AD79. It is close to Pompeii. , one of the towns buried by the volcano Vesuviusa volcano near Naples, southern Italy. It erupted in 79 AD, destroying the Ancient Roman cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii. in 79 AD, diggers in the 1800s found a whole library in a villa buried under the ash. It contained more than 1,800 papyrus scrolls.

The problem? They had been burnt to a crisp by the heat of the eruptionAn act or instance of erupting.. If they tried to read them, they would fall apart. The scrolls were locked away in hope of a miracle.

This week that miracle arrived. On Monday it was announced that three students had managed to read 2,000 Greek letters from one of the scrolls using a CT scanA computed tomography scan - a medical imaging technique usually used to make images of inside the body. and an AIA computer programme that has been designed to think.  programme.

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They have already worked out that the scrolls were written by Philodemus, a philosopherA thinker who comes up with ideas about big questions in life. . They hope his writing could tell us lots about the ancient world.

There are lots more books to read. But there is just one problem. It costs £79 per centimetre to read the books, so it might be a long time until we have read them all!

Could this rewrite our history?

Yes! Philodemus could tell us so much we do not know about the ancient world. This could change everything we thought was true.

No! All of the really important texts were copied many times and saved. So it is likely that Philodemus's thoughts were not really that interesting!