Scientists have given a status report on their efforts to use CT scans and artificial intelligence to decipher rolled-up papyrus scrolls that were buried in volcanic ash almost 2,000 years ago.
The researchers say they’ve found hints that one of the scrolls was written more than a century before the eruption, which destroyed the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the year 79. Another partially deciphered scroll hints that the collection may well reveal previously unknown lore about Roman and Greek mythology.
It’s the latest chapter in a scientific quest that began 274 years ago.
An excerpt from a PBS documentary explains how fragile scrolls from ancient Herculaneum can be “virtually unwrapped.”
More than 1,800 charred and carbonized scrolls were found in 1752 when archaeologists excavated a villa in Herculaneum that was thought to have belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. Scholars tried a wide range of techniques to unroll the fragile scrolls, but those attempts often succeeded only in turning the blackened lumps into dust.
More than 20 years ago, a team led by University of Kentucky computer scientist Brent Seales started working on a non-invasive “virtual unwrapping” process that analyzed X-ray scans of the rolled-up scrolls. An AI model was trained to recognize subtle traces of ink inside the charred hunks of papyrus, slice by slice — and synthesize the readings to resurrect the marks on the scroll, letter by letter.
The project made headlines in 2023 when a member of the Kentucky team announced that he had deciphered the first 10 letters written on one of the scrolls — including the word “porphyras,” which is the Greek word for “purple.” Months later, he and two other team members won the grand prize in the $1 million Vesuvius Challenge by decoding a passage that discussed the pursuit of pleasure.
Scholars attributed the text to Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher who is thought to have worked in the library of the Herculaneum villa where the scrolls were found.
This week, experts on the Herculaneum scrolls are gathering in Naples, Italy, to share their progress since those initial discoveries. During a livestreamed video presentation, Seales declared that the virtual-imaging technology has advanced to such an extent that researchers should eventually be able to “unwrap” all of the carbonized Herculaneum scrolls. And that’s not all.
“We’re using AI and advanced computer science and imaging to read the scrolls without opening them,” he said. “I’m confident that what we’ve done will work, not just with scrolls, but with other kinds of objects around the world.”
The Vesuvius Challenge team provides an update during a Naples conference focusing on the Herculaneum scrolls.
In the past three years, scientists have fine-tuned their X-ray imaging techniques to quadruple the resolution of the scans. And researchers have put in more than 5,000 hours of work to annotate the scroll scans for the project’s AI model.
Nat Friedman, the former CEO of GitHub and a co-founder of the Vesuvius Challenge, said discoveries were being made as recently as the night before today’s presentation.
He said one of the scrolls has been completely “unwrapped” to produce legible text. “This is the first time we have what is effectively a complete reading of a closed Herculaneum scroll,” he said. “This is a very exciting milestone for us and the project.”
In this case, “complete” doesn’t mean that the full original text could be read — but only that all of the text on the part of the scroll that survived has been deciphered.
The scroll, known as PHerc 1667, is a philosophical treatise on ethics from a Stoic perspective — a point of view that runs counter to the pleasure-seeking Epicurean line of thought. One line reads, “We will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature.”
Based on the references included in the text, and the archaic look of the inked letters, the research team says the scroll appears to date back to the 2nd century B.C. That would be more than a century before the Vesuvius eruption — which would make PHerc 1667 one of the oldest known scrolls from the Roman era.
Another scroll, PHerc 139, was found to have an intriguing title. It was attributed to Philodemus and labeled “On Gods, Book 8.” Researchers previously knew about one or two books in the series, but the reference to eight books suggests that the collection of scrolls might include several more previously unknown treatises on mythological deities. For now, deciphering Book 8 is still on the team’s to-do list.
Yet another scroll, PHerc 172, was identified as Philodemus’ “On Vices, Book 1.” Seventy columns of the scroll have been deciphered so far, papyrologist Federica Nicolardi said.
A passage from “On Vices” describes a ne’er-do-well whose type might be familiar to modern-day readers: “‘… and (he is apt) to show the goods he has bought to people who run into him. And to go and stand by the barber’s shop or the perfumer’s and explain that he intends to get drunk.’ And to expose both the daughter of so-and-so and the son of so-and-so; and no doubt to call fellow citizens before an archon (chief magistrate) …”
This week, the researchers made another breakthrough relating to the scroll that yielded the first letters for the Vesuvius Challenge. “Literally last night, in front of Mount Vesuvius, everything changed,” Nicolardi said. “We have now unwrapped the full length of the scroll, around 130 wraps, for a total of approximately 140 columns of new text.”
Nicolardi said she has started to compare sections from the new version of the text with what was previously decoded from a lower-resolution scan. “In some cases we were right, in some cases we were wrong, but we can read much more today,” she said.
Two scans of the Herculaneum scroll known as PHerc Paris 4 show how the resolution has improved between 2023 (upper image) and now (lower image). Credit: Vesuvius Challenge.
Going forward, members of the Vesuvius Challenge plan to continue with upgrades to the scanning process as well as to the AI model for “unrolling” the scrolls. They also want the wider scientific community — and the general public — to get involved in the quest.
“We’re making the entire collection of all of our scans, all of our data, all of our code, all of our internal models, all of that available publicly, so anyone can dive in and tackle some of these next problems, and maybe make a big breakthrough,” Friedman said.
Friedman said a new $1 million grand prize would be offered for the next year to the first person or team to read any of the Herculaneum scrolls in its entirety — and share their work in public.
“This is an invitation to the rest of the world to join us on this adventure,” he said. “I think most people start a little bit curious, and then they get sucked in, and then they find that they’ve spent months or years doing this. But I can’t think of a better way to lose six months of your life than doing this, and finding ancient text that’s never been seen before, and getting a million bucks.”
For more about the Herculaneum scrolls, check out this week’s report from National Geographic.
