- The Vesuvius challenge decodes scrolls affected by the 79 AD eruption
- Another scroll has just been partially read by the AI
- This despite the fact that the roll is rolled up and severely burned
Look at the ancient PHerc Scroll of 1667, taken from the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum, which was smothered by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, and you’d think there wasn’t much chance of finding out what was on it. It’s rolled up, burnt and black and impossible to open without destroying most of it.
But using the latest AI techniques, researchers from the Vesuvius Challenge project (via The Guardian) have now been able to read 20 columns of sealed text detailing the much-debated Stoic philosophy of the time — and how it relates to ethics, art and human behavior.
Here’s how it works: Without having to open this scroll and others like it, a combination of X-rays and AI algorithms can be used to recognize subtle differences between papyrus fibers locked within the charred manuscript. This tells the researchers where the ink is.
Additional AI processing can identify and fill in fragments of letters and suggest options for what may be missing. It is then left to human researchers to read through and interpret what the writing actually means – an approach that has seen several successes since the Vesuvius Challenge was launched in 2023.
To dig into the texts
Experts believe that PHerc 1667 may actually date from two or three centuries before the eruption of Vesuvius, making it an intriguing glimpse into the ancient past. The same cloud of fire and ash that enveloped Herculaneum also (and more famously) covered Pompeii, although the two cities were preserved in quite different ways.
Researchers working on the project say the scroll is one of many believed to be housed inside a library and part of a luxury Roman villa. Before now, the scroll has already been broken in half—it now measures just 8 cm (3.15 inches) in length—and part of it has disintegrated from previous attempts to drill it open.
Each new discovery reveals more about the scroll collection as a whole, including how these texts relate to each other and who wrote them. A preliminary analysis suggests that this particular scroll may have been written by the Greek philosopher Chrysippus, a prominent member of the Stoic school.
“People now know that it can be done, and now we are investigating what [the texts] actually means,” said one of the research team, computer scientist Professor Brent Seales from the University of Kentucky, to The Guardian. “For me, it’s the World Cup. I just won the world championship: that’s my victory.”
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