Scholars use AI to read scrolls scorched by Vesuvius eruption
Classical scholars believe scrolls buried by Mount Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago could soon be deciphered and “rewrite” our understanding of antiquity after a group of students used artificial intelligence to reveal charred text.
The Herculaneum Papyri, held in a library thought to belong to the family of Julius Caesar, were turned to charcoal when the Roman town was buried by the volcanic eruption in AD 79.
The collection is believed to contain thousands of ancient texts, possibly including works by Aeschylus, and Sappho, or even revelations around the early years of Christianity.
Since their discovery in 1752, most attempts to unfurl the charred scrolls and unlock their secrets have proved futile, with the carbonised lumps simply crumbling to ash.
But at least 15 passages have now been deciphered by three students who used AI to develop a tool that allowed them to identify the text from digital scans of a seared scroll.
Luke Farritor, a student from Nebraska, Youssef Nader a PhD student in Berlin, and Julian Schilliger, a scholar in Zurich, developed the tool in response to a global challenge set by Nat Friedman, a US tech executive, and academic Brent Seales.
The trio will share the $700,000 (£554,000) grand prize. Mr Farritor, a computer science student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, had already won $40,000 after he decoded the first letters on the scroll – spelling the Greek word for purple.
Mr Farritor, 22, spent much of the last year developing a machine-learning model that could detect ultra-faint differences in the texture of the carbonised scrolls to identify the presence of ink not visible to the human eye.
He enlisted the help of Mr Nader and Mr Schilliger and was able to detect 15 passages comprising more than 2,000 characters, an estimated 5 per cent of the scrolls’ text.
The Herculaneum Papyri were buried inside a luxury villa believed to have belonged to Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, a Roman senator whose daughter Calpurnia was married to Julius Caesar.
It constitutes the largest surviving library from the Greco-Roman world. Most of the texts that have proven legible have been attributed to the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus.
Thousands of the manuscripts were deemed irreparably damaged but classicists hope the technology could offer an invaluable window into antiquity, perhaps including texts related to Paul the Apostle, who is known to have passed through the region decades before the volcanic eruption.
“Some of these texts could completely rewrite the history of key periods of the ancient world,” Robert Fowler, a classicist and the chair of the Herculaneum Society, told Bloomberg.
“This is the society from which the modern Western world is descended.”
The students’ discovery is still being translated, but an early analysis suggests it is a philosophical treatise on the pleasure of food and music.
“In the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant,” the author writes.
Prof Fowler and other experts believe the newly deciphered text to be another work by Philodemus.
A preliminary analysis has also confirmed that the text was never duplicated, meaning that it has gone unread since at least AD 79.
“It’s a situation that you practically never encounter as a classicist,” Tobias Reinhardt, a professor of ancient philosophy and Latin literature at the University of Oxford, told Bloomberg.
“The idea that you are reading a text that was last unrolled on someone’s desk 1,900 years ago is unbelievable.”
Mr Friedman, who launched the $1 million Vesuvius Challenge last year, set out with the ambition of encouraging people to develop AI software capable of reading four passages from a single scroll.
On the back of its success, his goal is to use the same techniques to decipher more scrolls, and, ultimately, “unlock all of them”.
