AI reads entire ancient scroll from Herculaneum for first time, revealing lost Stoic philosophy

Ancient Roman scrolls destroyed by Mount Vesuvius digitally unrolled in full for first time

This Silicon Valley-backed venture is unraveling the mangled remains of scrolls ruined by the 79 C.E. eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed Herculaneum and Pompeii How do you read a book you can't open? That's precisely what Brent Seales, a professor at the University of Kentucky, has spent his career trying to figure out. And on Thursday, his life's work has reached a pinnacle: Seales, alongside a huge group of volunteers and scientists working as part of the Vesuvius Challenge, has helped developed technology to see inside books and scrolls we can't open without destroying them. At a press conference, Nat Friedman, one of the Challenge's main backers and former CEO of GitHub, unveiled several digitally unrolled scrolls from the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum, which was buried under lava by Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. One of the scrolls, called PHerc 1667, can now be read in its entirety. "We were not only able to completely unroll this scroll, from end to end, but we were able to extract nearly all the text, and make it legible," Friedman said. The scroll has been digitally unwrapped using a technique pioneered by Seales called Volume Cartographer, which takes scans of a 3D manuscript, layer by layer, and then effectively flattens these into 2D images that can then be read. The scans are made by synchrotron scanners, which are massive particle accelerators that can beam high-power x-rays at the object, revealing its inner layers down to the atomic level. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. What the Vesuvius Challenge has done is to take some two decades-worth of Seales' work and accelerate it -- in part by using artificial intelligence to help speed up and automate the work, and in part by getting a huge community of people to contribute to the Challenge. "AI has been a huge accelerator, and a huge accelerant, because the technique itself, we needed a breakthrough to amplify the way we could detect the ink inside these scans," explains Seale. "To go to scale, we needed a way to build a label set -- you know, here's ink, here's not ink -- much more effectively than doing things by hand." AI coding agents also mean the research team can try new techniques much faster than if they had to write all the code themselves, he adds. The achievement is remarkable considering the condition of the scroll: Called PHerc. 172, the scroll looks like a delicate piece of charred wood. It was among the hundreds of documents destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which obliterated Herculaneum and Pompeii, killing at least 1,500 people. As horrific as this disaster was, the volcanic ash also preserved everything in the towns where it lay, including the burnt scrolls. They were found inside a villa that has become known as the Villa dei Papiri, or Villa of the Papyrus. Some 400 of these papyrus scrolls remain intact, says Seales. And now, he and the Vesuvius Challenge can read them for the first time in nearly 2,000 years. "To restore these lost voices, I feel like I myself am finding mine," says Seales. Among the digitally unwrapped scrolls that the Challenge unveiled on Thursday is a previously unknown text by Philodemus, a leading Epicurean philosopher, called, "On the Gods, Booke Eight." In fact, scholars had no idea that Philodemus had written any volumes "On the Gods," let alone eight of them. Papyrologist Federica Nicolardi said on Thursday at the same event that the team has already identified a number of intriguing passages, including some on the nature of deities and providence. "These are no longer anonymous ancient books," she said. "Imagine being able to recover the titles of hundreds of still unopened scrolls. It would be like reconstructing the catalogue of an ancient library." The achievement comes some two years after the Vesuvius Challenge first announced that three volunteers, Luke Farritor, Youssef Nader and Julian Schilliger, had managed to clearly pick out the ink on one of the Herculaneum scrolls' layers of papyrus, making it legible by papyrologists for the first time. The manuscript, a treatise of Epicurean philosophy also likely written by Philodemus, was entirely unknown to scholars before the Challenge. Seales says that having the Silicon Valley-backed competition may seem risky or unfamiliar to other academics used to more traditional research funding structures. But he felt confident in all the work his team at the University of Kentucky had done before Friedman and the Challenge's co-founder, Daniel Gross, a tech investor who has led AI development at Apple, actually approached him. "I may not have taken that risk earlier in my career, but at the point where I'm at now, I felt that this was absolutely a really fun thing to try, and you know, it ended up being a home run," he says. "I think it can be a pattern for others who are in the right place in the right moment." Now, Seales and his team have scanned 45 scrolls. Already, papyrologists are deciphering new texts that indicate other possible authors in the Herculaneum collection, including one of the leaders of the Stoic philosophy school. For Seales, this feels like the moment where his work is effectively done -- and others can now take the lead on reconstructing the voices within these scrolls. "There's this deep-seated feeling of completion that I haven't had in a really long time, because Vesuvius has been looming over my life for two decades," Seales says. "We always go into our fields thinking that the field we go into is really the one we're going to change, right? But it turns out I'm changing the field of classical philology and papyrology, and I'm not any of those things," he says. "I've created a field of people who are like me ... I've created a community, and we're going to share this experience, so that feels really great." Seales is excited to take the technology and apply it to collections of photographic negatives from the birth of photography, such as by Eadweard Muybridge, whose 1878 "The Horse in Motion" is considered the first example of using photography to study a body in motion. These kinds of old negatives are often stored inside cans and are so fragile they can't be unrolled without destroying them, Seales says. "I think we never understand origins very well, right? Like, what were these guys really photographing on a bad day? What did they think they were just going to throw away? Sometimes that's the most interesting stuff."

Lost books by ancient philosophers recovered from 'unreadable' scrolls

Scrolls from the Roman library of Herculaneum that were carbonised by a volcanic eruption have been read in their entirety for the first time, thanks to scans and AI software Long-lost works of ancient philosophy have been recovered from papyrus scrolls that were scorched by the AD 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius and thought to be impossible to read. For the first time, researchers have used AI to extract the entire surviving text from super-high-resolution 3D scans of a scroll without unrolling it. The scrolls come from the library of Herculaneum, which was buried along with Pompeii nearly 2000 years ago. Scholars have been trying to read the carbonised scrolls, which resemble lumps of charcoal, since the library was discovered in 1752. Physically unwrapping them risks their destruction and the ink they are written in is mostly indistinguishable from the charred papyri - at least to human eyes. Since 2023, however, the Vesuvius Challenge project has used particle accelerators to scan dozens of scrolls and provided the scans to an online community, who have helped write AI software to digitally unwrap the scrolls and detect ink on them. The approach has made book titles, authors and short passages readable. Now, though, the team has uncovered 1.5 metres of text, written across 22 columns, from a 2-centimetre-wide scroll core whose outer layers were stripped off by scholars through the centuries in an effort to read it. "We find records of several attempts to open it... but they couldn't read anything," says Federica Nicolardi at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy. "There are some fragments surviving from the last attempt to physically open it, but you can really see just a couple of letters. So virtual unwrapping was able to change the history of this papyrus." The scroll is what Vesuvius Challenge co-founder Brent Seales at the University of Kentucky refers to as an "impossible scroll", one of hundreds that survived the assaults of early papyrologists, who could only read the "easier ones". Longer sections of the impossible scrolls are now becoming readable due to a combination of higher-resolution imaging, down to 2 micrometres, and more scan data for training the team's data-hungry AI algorithms, he says. Currently, their AI models are adapted to individual scrolls due to differences in, for example, the inks used. But Seales hopes that when the AI has seen enough of the collection, it will be capable of finding ink on any of them. "That's where we are with large language models," he says. "But that's because they've trained those models repeatedly on the entire internet, and we're not there yet with scrolls." The unwrapped text speaks of ethics, art and human nature, making multiple references to the Stoic doctrine. It is typical of scripts from the 2nd century BC, says Nicolardi, and it mentions the nephew of the Greek Stoic philosopher Chrysippus - making Chrysippus himself "the most natural candidate for authorship", she says. Chrysippus is regarded as one of the architects of Stoicism, but almost all his work was lost to history. According to classicist Thomas Coward at the University of Bristol, UK, we mainly know of it through other, often critical authors. "To have access to a source text rather than quotes and summaries, which can be modified or interpreted by other writers, is very important," he says, likening such a discovery to uncovering lost works by Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein that were only referenced by other scientists. One of Chrysippus's critics was the lesser-known 1st-century Epicurean philosopher Philodemus, whose own works in the Herculaneum library were sponsored by its presumed owner: Julius Caesar's father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus. Another scroll made readable by the scans has been identified as On Gods, Book 8 by Philodemus, extending his previously known work On Gods, Book 1 to at least an eight-book series. The findings represent extraordinary progress in imaging and the computational methods required for digital unwrapping, says Nicholas Freer at the University of Newcastle, UK, who believes the techniques could "radically transform" our understanding of ancient worlds. "The reason why these developments matter so much is that hundreds of scrolls still remain unopened," he says. "What we're seeing now isn't just a single, spectacular breakthrough. We're witnessing the beginning of what could be a decades-long process of recovery." For Seales, who has pioneered digital unwrapping techniques for decades, the discoveries mark a transition from obsessing about whether the technology works to letting the scrolls do the talking. "What people are going to care about now is: whose name actually appears, how old is the scroll and what does it say about philosophy?" he says. "So we're working ourselves out of a job, but it's all about restoring the lost voices." If he has any regrets, it is that so many scrolls were destroyed before he got a chance to read them. "The ones they pulled from the ground... the original 1752 scrolls, I believe we would be reading them instantly [now] because they were the easiest ones to read," he says.

They read the scroll thing! AI helps decipher ancient document charred by Vesuvius

A sealed scroll from the Roman town of Herculaneum, which was destroyed by Mount Vesuvius' eruption nearly 2,000 years ago, has finally given up its secrets, thanks to a combination of machine learning and high-resolution CT scans. In 2023, researchers managed to decipher a few words from among the char and ash that make up the bulk of the scrolls. Some of those same prize-winning researchers recovered more passages from one of the scrolls, PHerc.Paris.4, netting them the $700,000 grand prize from the Vesuvius Challenge contest in early 2024. Fast forward two more years, and those grand prize winners are now part of the Vesuvius Challenge team that managed to read the surviving portion of a rolled scroll end-to-end, as the VC team shared in a Thursday announcement and detailed in an accompanying paper [PDF]. According to the research paper, the ability to make out the entirety of the scroll was thanks to high-resolution phase-contrast X-ray microtomography performed at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France - an improved imaging technique over prior methods used to capture prior images that were analyzed in the prize competition. That wasn't all, though: They say that much of their work succeeded because of a new "workflow" they developed to scan scrolls, detect ink on charred papyrus, virtually "unroll" the scrolls by modeling their deformed surfaces, and preserve those surfaces digitally, allowing machine learning models to identify letters across an entire scroll rather than just isolated patches. "The key transition marked by the present work is therefore from exceptional local recovery to systematic scroll-scale recovery," the team wrote. In other words, provided they can account for the particularities of the hundreds of sealed scrolls recovered from Herculaneum's Villa of the Papyri, the world's only surviving intact library from antiquity, this could mark the beginning of an explosion in new material for historians. So, what did it say? PHerc.Paris.4 wasn't at the center of this breakthrough either, though they did have some exciting news to share on that front that we'll get to. Instead, the breakthrough centered on PHerc. 1667, a previously unread rolled scroll whose preserved text was read continuously from end to end for the first time. The work appears to be a treatise on Stoic philosophy focused on ethics - a favorite subject of Zeno, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and their intellectual fellows. "Having certainly strained ourselves to the utmost through research and learning, we will no longer be inferior to them in any respect," a passage from the latter part of the scroll reads, "accomplishing in like manner the things that befit them and possessing the same practical wisdom as they." Quite a fitting bit of ancient wisdom to be the first to see the light of the modern world. While the team digitally unrolled the scroll, detected its ink, and transcribed the preserved text from end to end, portions of the original PHerc. 1667 were lost long ago during earlier attempts to physically open the scroll, before archaeologists had access to sophisticated X-ray imaging and AI-assisted analysis. "Earlier attempts to open it by hand -- in the nineteenth century, and again in 1969 and the 1980s -- destroyed its outer layers," the Vesuvius Challenge team said, noting that only an 8 cm-high core remains of the original scroll, which originally measured between 19 and 24 cm in height when standing upright. Nonetheless, "it is the first time the preserved text of a rolled Herculaneum scroll has been read continuously, end to end, rather than in isolated words or patches," the team said. In addition to the full reveal of what's left of PHerc.1667, the team also managed to pick out some information from a couple of other scrolls using their new workflow. One, PHerc.139, was determined to be a copy of book eight of epicurean philosopher Philodemus' treatise On Gods, meaning scholars can expect to know what they're looking at once the scroll is fully digitally unrolled. The second concerns, as mentioned above, PHerc.Paris.4. The new higher-resolution images taken for this latest experiment make the words on the scroll directly visible for the first time, meaning that there's no need to rely on algorithmic detection of individual words and phrases from CT scans. Most crucially, the new scans of Paris.4 perfectly matched what the grand prize team made out several years ago, providing independent confirmation that the prize went to the right team. There are still challenges to meet in unwrapping and deciphering the rest of the ancient library, with the team calling out geometric challenges in surface prediction that can render an unrolled scan unreadable, and radiometric challenges that make ink identification difficult, as ancient recipes were inconsistent. Still, it's a massive leap forward and the team believes the X-ray and machine learning workflow they've developed is ready to scale. "The thoughts of the ancient world, sealed in darkness for two millennia, are coming back into the light -- a whole scroll at a time," the Vesuvius Challenge team said. I, for one, can't wait to see what ancient secrets they discover next. ®

Complete text of carbonised Herculaneum scroll unlocked for first time

ROME, June 25 (Reuters) - Researchers using artificial intelligence and advanced imaging said on Thursday they had achieved the first complete reading of a closed Herculaneum scroll burnt by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago. The breakthrough marks a major step toward deciphering hundreds of ancient manuscripts found at Herculaneum, the Roman town destroyed along with Pompeii in the 79 AD disaster. Looking to speed up the scholarship, the Vesuvius Challenge, which is promoting new technologies to try to understand the carbonised text, said it would place all its data, code and models of the papyri online and offer a $1 million prize to the first person or team to read in full any other scroll. "Just a year ago it would have been crazy for any of us to ⁠believe that there would be a complete scroll read completely non-invasively with hundreds of columns of text," said Brent Seales, professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky and one of the founders of the project. "Today we have shown you that that is possible," he told a conference streamed from Naples. "I believe we're going to read every single one of the scrolls in the collection." UNCOVERED TEXT EXPLORES ETHICS, ARTS AND HUMAN BEHAVIOUR The blackened, fragile scrolls cannot be physically opened without severe damage. Researchers have instead used high-resolution scans and computational techniques to "virtually unwrap" them and detect ink on the papyrus layers. So far, about 45 papyrus scrolls and scroll fragments have been scanned. More than 600 unopened scrolls remain, and large parts of the villa where they were discovered have yet to be excavated, raising the possibility that more could yet be ⁠found. The Vesuvius Challenge has already awarded $1.8 million in prizes for work linked to unmasking the Herculaneum texts, but Nat Friedman, a U.S. technology executive and founding sponsor of the project, said new insight would lead to major advances. "We think it is possible to dramatically improve the algorithms that we have ... and we think that the ink detection techniques that we're using could probably be greatly advanced," he said, encouraging more computing experts to get involved. Among the new material ⁠presented on Thursday were 70 columns of text from "On Vices, Book 1", attributed to the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus. Nearly 1.5 metres (5 ft) of readable text across 20 columns was also recovered from a document dated to 200-300 BC -- the oldest Herculaneum scroll yet unwrapped -- exploring ethics, arts and human behaviour. Federica Nicolardi, lead papyrologist ⁠for the Vesuvius Challenge, said new technologies were transformative. "Even with the most successful methods available ... to physically unwrap the scrolls and read them, one had to damage them. But with virtual unwrapping, we are no longer forced to choose between preserving and reading these extraordinary artefacts. We ⁠can do both," she said. Nicolardi said progress was snowballing, with researchers in the last 24 hours unwrapping the full length of one scroll, producing about 140 columns of new text. Until recently, they were only uncovering about 10% of columns, she added. "Literally last night, in front of Mount Vesuvius, something, or I should say everything, changed," she said. Reporting by Crispian Balmer; Editing by Andrew Heavens Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

AI just helped researchers read a 2,000-year-old Mount Vesuvius scroll that's too charred to ever be opened -- as X-ray images reveal ancient stoic philosophy

* The Vesuvius Challenge is decoding scrolls hit by the 79 AD eruption * Another scroll has just been partially read by AI * This is despite the scroll being rolled up and severely burned Look at the ancient PHerc 1667 scroll, recovered from the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum that was smothered by the Mount Vesuvius eruption of 79 AD, and you'd think there wasn't much chance of finding out what was written on it. It's rolled up, burned and blackened, and impossible to open up without destroying most of it. However, using the latest AI techniques, researchers from the Vesuvius Challenge project (via The Guardian) have now been able to read 20 columns of sealed-off text, describing the stoic philosophy that was much discussed at the time -- and how it relates to ethics, art, and human behavior. Here's how it works: without needing to open up 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 away in the charred manuscript. That tells researchers where the ink is. Further AI processing can identify and fill out fragments of lettering, and suggest possibilities for what might be missing. It's then left to human researchers to read through and interpret what the writing actually means -- an approach that has seen multiple successes since the Vesuvius Challenge launched in 2023. Digging into the texts Experts think that PHerc 1667 may actually date from two or three centuries before Mount Vesuvius erupted, making it an intriguing look into the ancient past. The same cloud of fire and ash that enveloped Herculaneum also (and more famously) covered Pompeii, though the two towns were preserved in quite different ways. Researchers working on the project say the scroll is one of many thought 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 tease it open. Each new discovery reveals more about the scroll collection as a whole, including how these texts relate to each other and who authored them. An initial analysis suggests this particular scroll may have been written by the Greek philosopher Chrysippus, a prominent member of the stoic school. "People now know that this can be done and now we're exploring what [the texts] actually mean," one of the research team, computer scientist Professor Brent Seales from the University of Kentucky, told The Guardian. "For me that's the World Cup. I just won the World Cup: that's my victory." Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.

AI helps read papyrus scroll burnt to crisp during Vesuvius eruption

Previously hidden text revealed without unrolling scroll discusses stoic philosophy on ethics, art and human behaviour The surviving part of an ancient scroll that was burnt to a crisp when Mount Vesuvius erupted nearly 2,000 years ago has been virtually unwrapped and read with help from artificial intelligence. Researchers uncovered 20 columns of previously hidden text covering more than a metre of charred papyrus without physically unrolling the scroll. The work discusses stoic philosophy on ethics, art and human behaviour and dates to the second or late-third century BC. The age of the scroll, named PHerc 1667, makes it one of the oldest in a collection of hundreds recovered from the library of a luxury Roman villa in Herculaneum that was blasted by heat and buried under ash in the volcanic eruption that destroyed nearby Pompeii in AD79. The ordeal and historic handling took its toll on the scroll: at some point it was broken in half, while past efforts to unwrap the document caused the outer layers to flake off or disintegrate. What remains is half the size of the original at only 8cm tall and 2cm wide. Dr Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples Federico II, said: "We don't have the full scroll, but the surviving object was unwrapped and that's a very important result because it shows that we are able to unwrap these objects completely." The achievement will be announced at a conference in Naples on Thursday and is the latest from the Vesuvius Challenge which launched in 2023 as a global contest to read some of the carbonised scrolls. The project has since handed out hundreds of thousands of dollars in prizes for teams that used artificial intelligence and other software to virtually unwrap the scrolls and read the text from high resolution X-ray images. Much of the Herculaneum library was dominated by Philodemus of Gadara, a Epicurean philosopher and poet in the first century BC. But while the title and author of PHerc 1667 remain unknown, its older age and contents point to another author. Analysis by Nicolardi and her colleagues suggests the text is a stoic treatise, perhaps authored by the Greek philosopher Chrysippus. He was the third head of the stoic school and has other works in the collection. The text refers to his nephew and pupil, Aristocreon. "At first, we were saying this could be an Epicurean talking about stoic doctrine," said Nicolardi. "But then I stopped and said, you know, if this was found outside of Herculaneum, we would categorise it as a stoic work." The Vesuvius Challenge was founded on work by Prof Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky. He showed how machine-learning algorithms could be trained to read the ink on the hidden layers of the scrolls by spotting subtle differences in the papyrus fibres in X-ray images. The contest, backed by Silicon Valley donors, attracted teams that honed the techniques for virtually unwrapping and reading the scrolls. The newly read text discusses the stoic concept of hormē, or impulse, and warns that failing to regulate behaviour with reason can lead to harmful passions and diversion from one's goals. Another concept is phronēsis or "practical wisdom", the highest virtue a person can have in stoic philosophy. In one passage, the author writes: "We will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature." The line suggests that reason and the innate human inclination to do good were crucial for furthering one's knowledge. Another virtually unwrapped scroll contained the words "Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8", revealing for the first time that On Gods was a multi-book work. Beforehand, only the first had been identified. "These unopened Herculaneum Scrolls look like dead books, but they're not," said Nicolardi. "They're starting to speak again." Seales said the challenge had now shifted from the techniques needed to read the burned scrolls to the scholarly work to understand them. "People now know that this can be done and now we're exploring what [the texts] actually mean," he said. "For me that's the world cup. I just won the world cup: that's my victory."

AI helps scientists decipher papyrus scroll burnt in Vesuvius eruption

The scroll was first discovered in the 1750s but was too fragile to open. Using AI, scholars deciphered the full text and discovered a philosophical treaties on ethics and human progress. An ancient scroll that survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD has finally revealed its secrets. Scientists were able to decipher the fragile scroll without unrolling it. Instead, they used artificial intelligence to uncover what ended up being, rather ironically, a philosophical treatise on ethics, human nature and moral progress. PHerc. 1667, as the scroll was dubbed, belonged to a library of carbonised manuscripts first unearthed in the 1750s in the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum. In total, some 1800s papyrus pieces were miraculously preserved under the ruins of one of the city's most lavish villas, which was destroyed in the eruption. The fragments form the only complete surviving library from the Greco-Roman world. But once this treasure came to light, a new challenge arose. The scrolls had survived a devastating eruption and had spent hundreds of years buried under volcanic ash; they were now too fragile to open. To unroll them meant risking them dissolving into dust. So they remained meticulously sealed. In 2023, the Vesuvius Challenge provided researchers and papyrus enthusiasts with a new incentive to decipher the scrolls by turning the puzzle into a global contest with cash prizes. Contestants used computer vision and machine learning -- a subset of AI -- to conclusive results. That very year, a 21-year-old computer science student received $40,000 after becoming "the first person in two millennia" to discover a word -- "purple" -- from an unopened scroll. A team of scientists from various European and US universities eventually managed to decipher all surviving text from an entire scroll this month. "PHerc. 1667 began as a blackened, rolled mass of carbonized papyrus," the Vesuvius Challenged said last week. "To read it, we never unrolled it physically. Instead, we scanned it with high-resolution X-rays, reconstructed the wound sheet inside the volume, flattened it into a readable surface, and used machine learning to bring out the faint traces of ancient ink." Earlier attempts to open PHerc. 1667 damaged the papyrus and left only 8cm of an original height of 19-24cm. Researchers recovered the full text from that surviving portion to find "a philosophical treatise on ethics concerned with ethics, arts and human behavior." The scroll also names Aristocreon, a nephew and disciple of Stoic philosopher Chrysippus. Scholars said the text's references, language and subject date it to the 2nd century BC and likely reflect Stoic doctrine. "For nearly two millennia, many of these texts have been physically preserved but intellectually inaccessible," said Vesuvius Challenge co-founder Brent Seales. "Today - after years of interdisciplinary work combining advanced imaging, artificial intelligence (AI), academic research and an innovation contest - we are finally able to read them." This latest effort also led to the identification of a new book by Epicurean philosopher Philodemus from another scroll. With just one manuscript deciphered, the Vesuvius Challenge is far from over. Hundreds more remain sealed, their secrets waiting to be discovered. "Today, we are hearing voices that have been silent for 2,000 years," Seales said. "For the first time, we are uncovering and reading them - but most importantly - we are beginning to understand them.

Scientists decipher new secrets from ancient scrolls scorched by Vesuvius eruption: "Finally able to read them"

Kerry Breen is a news editor at CBSNews.com. A graduate of New York University's Arthur L. Carter School of Journalism, she previously worked at NBC News' TODAY Digital. She covers current events, breaking news and issues including substance use. A University of Kentucky project using artificial intelligence to help decode an ancient Roman mystery has led to a major discovery, researchers announced Thursday. In 79 A.D., the eruption of Mount Vesuvius buried the Roman city of Pompeii and the nearby town of Herculaneum. During a dig in Herculaneum in the 18th century, archaeologists found 1,800 papyrus scrolls in an intact ancient library, deep under the site of a villa that was destroyed by Vesuvius' eruption. But reading them was impossible: The scrolls are brittle and charred, and unravelling them turns them into ash. For centuries, researchers have worked to interpret the scrolls. Recent technology led to a breakthrough: A particle accelerator and AI were used to identify ink, even faint traces, allowing researchers to virtually unwrap the delicate scrolls. But interpreting the ancient language is another project entirely. In 2023, Brent Seales launched the Vesuvius Challenge, a global competition offering prize money for those who can help interpret the writing. Three college students became the first to extract words from a carbonized scroll in 2024. But they only interpreted about 5% of one scroll. The second phase of the challenge led to Thursday's major discovery. The University of Kentucky's Stanley and Karen Pigman School of Engineering, which leads the research in collaboration with the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli Vittorio Emanuele III in Naples, said that experts have virtually unwrapped one entire scroll, recovered more than 70 columns of text from another, identified two new books from ancient Rome, and recovered "sufficient text to support new critical scholarly editions." The virtually unwrapped scroll, PHerc. 1667, is one of the oldest in the collection, Nicolardi said. Now that it has been unrolled, efforts to determine the authorship of the paper is underway. One of the books revealed that the philosopher Philodemus wrote an eight-book series. Only one book had been previously known to exist. "For nearly two millennia, many of these texts have been physically preserved but intellectually inaccessible," Seales said in a news release. "Today -- after years of interdisciplinary work combining advanced imaging, artificial intelligence (AI), academic research and an innovation contest -- we are finally able to read them." The amount of text revealed means scholars can read the scrolls as complete arguments, rather than as fragments. Federica Nicolardi, an assistant professor in papyrology at the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II in Naples, said that marks a "transformational shift" for researchers. "Today, we are hearing voices that have been silent for 2,000 years," Seales said. "For the first time, we are uncovering and reading them -- but most importantly -- we are beginning to understand them." Still, more than 600 scrolls remain unopened and unread. Giorgio Angelotti, a project lead with the Vesuvius Challenge, said the effort is "ongoing" and that archaeologists need "everyone's help to read the scrolls." Seales said he believes the entire library can be deciphered. "This is no longer just about imaging or machine learning," Seales said. "Now we need experts who can read, edit and understand what they are saying."

AI helps recover complete text of Herculaneum scroll burnt by Mount Vesuvius

Researchers using artificial intelligence and advanced imaging said on Thursday they had achieved the first complete reading of a closed Herculaneum scroll burnt by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago. The breakthrough marks a major step toward deciphering hundreds of ancient manuscripts found at Herculaneum, the Roman town destroyed along with Pompeii in the 79 CE disaster. Looking to speed up the scholarship, the Vesuvius Challenge, which is promoting new technologies to try to understand the carbonized text, said it would place all its data, code and models of the papyri online and offer a $1 million prize to the first person or team to read in full any other scroll. "Just a year ago it would have been crazy for any of us to believe that there would be a complete scroll read completely non-invasively with hundreds of columns of text," said Brent Seales, professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky and one of the founders of the project. "Today we have shown you that that is possible," he told a conference streamed from Naples. "I believe we're going to read every single one of the scrolls in the collection." Uncovered text explores ethics, art, human behavior The blackened, fragile scrolls cannot be physically opened without severe damage. Researchers have instead used high-resolution scans and computational techniques to "virtually unwrap" them and detect ink on the papyrus layers. So far, about 45 papyrus scrolls and scroll fragments have been scanned. More than 600 unopened scrolls remain, and large parts of the villa where they were discovered have yet to be excavated, raising the possibility that more could yet be found. The Vesuvius Challenge has already awarded $1.8 million in prizes for work linked to unmasking the Herculaneum texts, but Nat Friedman, a US technology executive and founding sponsor of the project, said new insight would lead to major advances. "We think it is possible to dramatically improve the algorithms that we have ... and we think that the ink detection techniques that we're using could probably be greatly advanced," he said, encouraging more computing experts to get involved. Among the new material presented on Thursday were 70 columns of text from "On Vices, Book 1," attributed to the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus. Nearly 1.5 meters of readable text across 20 columns was also recovered from a document dated to 200-300 BCE, the oldest Herculaneum scroll yet unwrapped, exploring ethics, arts and human behavior. New tech is 'transformative,' says lead researcher Federica Nicolardi, lead papyrologist for the Vesuvius Challenge, said new technologies were transformative. "Even with the most successful methods available ... to physically unwrap the scrolls and read them, one had to damage them. But with virtual unwrapping, we are no longer forced to choose between preserving and reading these extraordinary artifacts. We can do both," she said. Nicolardi said progress was snowballing, with researchers in the last 24 hours unwrapping the full length of one scroll, producing about 140 columns of new text. Until recently, they were only uncovering about 10% of columns, she added. "Literally last night, in front of Mount Vesuvius, something, or I should say everything, changed," she said.