AI looked Inside Burned 2,000-Year-Old Vesuvius Scroll, and Finds ...?

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Scientists have used X-ray imaging and AI to look inside a 2,000-year-old Roman papyrus scroll that was burned when Mt. Vesuvius erupted. What they found is amazing.



Professor Brent Seales from the University of Kentucky, who co-founded the Vesuvius Challenge, was impressed by the amount of text this scroll might reveal. The challenge brings together experts from around the world to use AI to read scrolls burned in the 79 CE eruption, which buried Pompeii and Herculaneum under 20 feet of ash.

Last year, three students won a $700,000 prize for using AI to read part of a scroll from a villa in Herculaneum. These scrolls are too fragile to open by hand, so scientists have turned to technology to "unroll" them digitally.

The scroll at the center of this new discovery is called PHerc. 172. It's one of three scrolls held at the University of Oxford's Bodleian Libraries. On Wednesday, the Vesuvius Challenge announced a big breakthrough: the first clear image of the scroll's contents, showing columns of Greek text.

"This scroll contains more text than we've ever seen from a scanned Herculaneum scroll," said Seales.

Experts from Oxford believe the scroll was written by Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher. They've already identified some Greek words in the text, including "foolish" and "disgust," which fit Philodemus' writing style. They think the scroll is a finished manuscript because of a symbol at the end of a line that shows it had a right-hand margin.

Richard Ovenden, Bodley's librarian, called it a historic moment. "It's amazing to see librarians, computer scientists, and classicists working together to uncover something from the past."