A burnt scroll and thousands of dollars at stake. The Vesuvius Challenge began in 2023 as a competition to reveal the secrets hidden in the Herculaneum papyri, some 800 rolled Greek scrolls that were completely charred during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD.
Now, for the first time, a group of researchers has managed to decipher one of these texts with the help of artificial intelligence. The challenge required three young students Youssef Nader (Berlin), Luke Farritor (Nebraska) and Julian Schilliger (Switzerland) to collaborate to reveal more than 2,000 characters when the challenge only asked for four passages of about 140 characters.
Last year, Farritor already managed to discover the first word on one of the scrolls, which turned out to be the Greek word “????????”, which means “purple dye” or “purple cloth”. Team efforts have now made it possible to know the content five percent of the roll.
Its author “was probably the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus,” who wrote “about music, food, and how to enjoy life’s pleasures,” according to contest organizer Nat Friedman on X (Twitter).
The young people used AI to help them distinguish ink from papyrus and discover the faint and almost illegible Greek letters by recognizing patterns from the high-resolution CT scans that Vesuvius Challenge had obtained of four burned cylinders.
The scrolls, found in the library of a villa in the city of Herculaneum believed to have been owned by Julius Caesar’s patrician father-in-law, are preserved in the Institute of France in Paris and in the National Library in Naples. In the past they were severely damaged and even collapsed when archaeologists tried to open them.
Nader, Farritor and Schillinger have won a prize of 700,000 dollars (650,000 euros) and their next objective will be to unlock up to 85% of the petrified scroll. The heat of the volcanic eruption turned the scrolls into a kind of charred trunks, so artificial intelligence allows their contents to be scanned without damaging their fragile structure.
The preliminary transcription indicates that the deciphered text is completely original and not a duplicate of another work. It seems to be a treatise on “pleasure,” the basis of Epicurean philosophy, which sought to improve life through the pursuit of moderate enjoyment and the cultivation of friendship.
In two consecutive columns of the scroll, Philodemus of Gadara shows his concern that the availability of goods may affect the pleasure they provide. “As also in the case of food, we do not immediately believe that scarce things are absolutely more pleasant than abundant ones,” the author writes.
Historians believe that this philosopher, who studied with Zeno of Sidon and was a teacher of Virgil, resided in the wealthy villa of Herculaneum where the petrified papyri were found and it could even be that the library, the only one from ancient Roman times that has survived To this day, it belonged to him.
The document also mentions a certain Xenophantus, the famous flutist who is also mentioned by Philodemus in his work On Music. “Scholars might call it a philosophical treatise,” note the organizers of the Vesuvius Challenge, “but it seems familiar to us and we can’t help but get the feeling that the first text we have discovered is a 2,000-year-old blog post about how to enjoy life”.
