The Herculaneum scrolls are among the most iconic and inaccessible of the world’s vast collection of damaged manuscripts. These scrolls were considered “illegible” since they were burned and charred by the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79 AD.
For more than 2,000 years, all the wisdom of the only library that survived from ancient times had remained unreachable to researchers. Until now, when scientists from the University of Kentucky have used Artificial Intelligence (AI) to put the pieces of the puzzle back together.
Professor Brent Seales announced at a press conference a few days ago that complete words from the Herculaneum scrolls had finally been read. “These texts were written at a time when world religions were emerging, the Roman Empire still ruled, and many parts of the world were unexplored,” he recalled.
“Many of the writings from this period have been lost. But the Herculaneum scrolls are still here.” The Greek characters ???????c, which have been revealed to mean “purple dye” or “purple-colored clothing,” are among the multiple characters and lines of text that have already been deciphered.
“This is incredibly exciting,” says Luke Farritor, the first successful Vesuvius Challenge participant. Shortly after, Youssef Nader, an Egyptian biorobotics graduate student in Berlin, discovered the same word in the same area, with even clearer results.
The text comes from a papyrus wrapper buried inside a charred, intact, and completely unopened parchment. To authenticate the findings, expert papyrologists evaluated the shape of each letter. Upon seeing the images, many of them could not contain their emotion.
“It is extremely fascinating to read entire words, not just sequences of letters, within a parchment,” says Federica Nicolardi, professor of papyrology at the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, in a statement. “This text has remained intact for centuries, protecting its contents. The most unique feature of the Herculaneum Library is that the preserved documents are completely unknown,” she adds.
Nicolardi indicates that the “purple dye was highly sought after in ancient Rome and was made from the glands of sea snails”, so the term discovered “could refer to the color purple, to the tunics, to the range of people who could afford dye or even mollusks,” he continued.
The work to achieve this result began two decades ago. Then, Brent Seales laid the foundation so that the Herculaneum scrolls could be read without even physically opening them, using non-invasive digital methods. In March 2023, the University of Kentucky professor managed to convince Silicon Valley investors to start a global competition to read the charred scrolls.
As part of the Vesuvius Challenge, the researchers released their software and thousands of 3D X-ray images of two rolled parchments belonging to the Institut de France in Paris and three papyrus fragments. These documents were among hundreds unearthed in the 1750s, when excavations at the villa revealed an extravagant library of Epicurean philosophical texts. They are believed to have belonged to a Roman statesman, possibly Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, father-in-law of Julius Caesar.
Even after remaining underground for 1,700 years, the charred papyri had not decomposed. They were buried in the solid volcanic flow of mud, earth, water and gases, then dried by heat, charred and preserved. The hope is that $1 million in prizes will encourage experts around the world to take advantage of the technology and speed up decoding.
“What the challenge has allowed us to do is recruit over a thousand research teams to work on a problem that would normally have about five people dedicated to it,” explains Seales. “The competitive aspect of this project is simply fascinating,” he celebrates.
Six months into the competition, contestants Farritor and Nader have separately developed machine learning methods to reveal the ink within X-ray CT scans of the parchment, resulting in the same finding. Youssef Nader has even already discovered more lines of text, which are currently being reviewed by papyrologists.
The ink used on the Herculaneum scrolls is different from that used to write ancient Hebrew and medieval documents. It is made of carbon, which is invisible to the human eye in Micro-Computed Tomography images. Hence the Kentucky team developed a neural network that “learns” what patterns look like in the data when there is ink, as opposed to how the patterns appear when there is not.
The collection includes more than 600 scrolls that remain sealed and illegible. But Seales believes that reading the complete compilation of Herculaneum scrolls is not only possible, but will be the ancient world’s greatest discovery to date. “Overcoming the damage suffered over a period of 2,000 years is no small challenge. But that’s what researchers do: together we conquer what seems impossible.”
