Ancient scrolls decoded by artificial intelligence

AI unlocks ancient Roman scrolls buried for 2,000 years by Mount Vesuvius

Three students have achieved what seemed impossible for centuries. Using artificial intelligence, they successfully deciphered ancient Roman scrolls that were carbonized by Mount Vesuvius’ devastating eruption in 79 A.D.

When the volcano erupted nearly two millennia ago, it didn’t just preserve Pompeii and Herculaneum under volcanic ash. The intense heat also carbonized over 1,800 papyrus scrolls in a luxury villa’s library. The scrolls were transformed into what appeared to be charred logs.

Ancient library preserved in volcanic ash

The scrolls were discovered in 1752 at the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, located about 10 miles (16 kilometers) north of Pompeii. This magnificent villa likely belonged to Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, Julius Caesar’s father-in-law.

The library represents the only complete ancient library from the classical world that has survived in its entirety. For 275 years, archaeologists faced an impossible choice: attempt to unroll these fragile documents and watch them crumble to dust, or leave them intact and never discover their secrets.

Many attempts at physical unrolling in the 18th and 19th centuries destroyed numerous scrolls. The remaining carbonized papyri, buried under 65 feet (20 meters) of volcanic material, appeared lost to history.

Technology makes “virtual unwrapping” possible

The solution came from Dr. Brent Seales, a computer science professor at the University of Kentucky. With support from a $500,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant, Seales developed a revolutionary technique. Dr. Seales used X-ray computed tomography scans to peer inside scrolls without physically opening them.

His software maps the two-dimensional surfaces within the three-dimensional structure of each scroll, essentially creating a digital unrolling process. However, this approach faced a critical challenge.

Traditional Roman ink, made from carbon, remained invisible to X-rays. The chemical composition of the ink was extremely similar to the surrounding carbonized papyrus. This is where machine learning transformed everything.

AI detects invisible ancient ink

In March 2023, Seales partnered with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross to launch the Vesuvius Challenge. This global competition offered over $1 million in prize money to accelerate progress in reading the scrolls.

The challenge attracted more than 1,000 teams worldwide. Contestants used Seales’ software and trained AI algorithms to detect incredibly faint ink traces that human eyes couldn’t see on X-ray images.

The first breakthrough came in October 2023 when Luke Farritor, a 21-year-old SpaceX intern and University of Nebraska student, identified the first complete word: “ΠΟΡΦΥΡΑϹ” (purple in ancient Greek). This discovery earned him the $40,000 First Letters Prize.

Students claim a $700,000 grand prize.

The ultimate success came when three students joined forces before the December 31, 2023 deadline. Youssef Nader, an Egyptian PhD student in Berlin, led the winning team that included Farritor and Julian Schilliger, a robotics student from Zurich.

In February 2024, the team was awarded the $700,000 grand prize for deciphering over 2,000 characters of text from the scrolls. Their machine learning algorithms revealed four complete passages, each containing at least 140 characters.

“It’s been an incredibly rewarding journey,” Nader said. “The adrenaline rush is what kept us going. It was insane. It meant working 20-something hours a day.”

Ancient philosophy reveals itself after 2,000 years.

The deciphered text appears to be a previously unknown work discussing the nature of pleasure, likely written by Epicurean philosopher Philodemus of Gadara. The passages consider whether the availability or scarcity of goods such as food affects our experience of pleasure.

This represents the first time in nearly 2,000 years that completely new text from the ancient world has been recovered. The discovered passages represent only five percent of one scroll, yet they demonstrate that what was once thought impossible is now achievable.

Future of digital archaeology

The current challenge, launched in 2024, aims to read 90 percent of four fully scanned scrolls. This breakthrough technology has applications far beyond Herculaneum’s library.

The same AI-powered methods can potentially read other damaged historical documents worldwide, possibly doubling our collection of texts from before the Middle Ages. Hundreds of thousands of text-based heritage materials in libraries and museums are too fragile or damaged to read using traditional methods.

Each successfully deciphered scroll brings researchers closer to understanding the full scope of Roman intellectual life, philosophy, and culture that was previously lost to time. With an estimated 800 scrolls remaining in Naples and potentially thousands more buried in the villa’s unexcavated levels, this discovery marks just the beginning of a new era in archaeological research.

The study detailing this breakthrough was published in collaboration with the Vesuvius Challenge team and is available through the competition’s official documentation.

—–

Like what you saw and read? Subscribe to our newsletter for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.

—–

Check us out on EarthSnap, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls and Earth.com.

—–