Ancient papyrus scrolls buried in ash after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 have been read for the first time using artificial intelligence (AI).
The Herculaneum Papyri are a collection of approximately 1,800 scrolls that, along with thousands of other relics, were charred during the volcanic eruption.
Located in the city of Herculaneum – near the city of Pompeii which was also destroyed – more than 800 scrolls were discovered in an ancient Roman villa and are now housed in a library in Naples, with every effort made to unroll them and read them after failing.
Until three students managed to read 15 columns in a scroll using AI-powered coding machines.
The breakthrough came as part of the Vesuvius Challenge, a competition which offered a prize pool of $1 million (£796,000) to help solve the problem.
Mount Vesuvius. Photo: Reuters/Ciro de Luca
Germany’s Youssef Nader, USA’s Luke Farritor and Switzerland’s Julian Schilliger will now share the $700,000 (£557,000) grand prize after reading more than 2,000 letters from the scroll.
“These fifteen columns come from the very end of the first scroll we were able to read and contain new text from the ancient world that has never been seen before,” Nat Friedman, one of the contest organizers, said on X .
He said it was probably written by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus who wrote about “music, food and enjoying the pleasures of life”.
Archaeological site of Herculaneum. Photo: Reuters/Ciro De Luca
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“Virtual unwrapping” of the scroll works by creating a 3D scan of the text using a scanner.
The scroll is then separated into segments and the inked regions are detected by a machine learning model – an application of AI.
The discovery impressed scientists and historians, including academic and presenter Professor Alice Roberts, who dubbed it “the archaeological discovery of a lifetime”.
The portion of the text deciphered represents only 5 percent of any of the scrolls already discovered, Mr. Friedman said, with the potential for thousands more scrolls yet to be discovered in the Villa of the Papyri.
“In 2024, our goal is to read a few passages of text on entire scrolls, and we are announcing a new grand prize of $100,000 for the first team to be able to read at least 90% of the four scrolls we have digitized.” .Friedman wrote about X.
