Artificial intelligence has helped recover the contents of an extensively damaged ancient scroll that survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE.
On Monday, three researchers won a $700,000 prize for their work using AI to read parts of a collection of charred, rolled-up scrolls that were carbonized by the intense heat from the volcanic eruption that famously buried the Roman town of Pompeii. About 800 of the hardened, crumbling documents, known as the Herculaneum Papyri, are housed in a library in Naples, Italy, and contain valuable insights into how our ancestors lived and thought 2,000 years ago.
Three researchers won the grand prize in the Vesuvius Challenge, an international machine learning and computer vision competition launched in March of last year that’s aimed at resurrecting the Herculaneum Papyri from the ashes of history. The inaugural challenge tasked participants with deciphering four scroll passages of at least 140 characters, with at least 85 percent of characters recoverable, from high-resolution CT scans of four scrolls carried out by the Vesuvius Challenge team at the the Diamond Light Source particle accelerator near Oxford, England.
Due to the scrolls’ highly fragile state, trying to unroll them would likely damage them even further.
The Vesuvius Challenge winners—Youssef Nader, an Egyptian biorobotics Ph.D. student in Berlin; student Luke Farritor, a 21-year-old SpaceX intern from Nebraska; and Julian Schilliger, a Swiss robotics student at ETH Zürich—used AI to distinguish ink from papyrus and make out the faint Greek writing in reveals 15 partial columns of hidden text hidden through pattern recognition. Papyrologists assessed each letter shape to authenticate the findings.
The author of the newly revealed passages, thought to be Epicurean philosopher Philodemus based on the topics and style of the text, writes about music, food and how to enjoy life’s pleasures, even appearing to take a swipe at adversaries who “have nothing to say about pleasure, either in general or in particular, when it is a question of definition.” The columns appear at the scroll’s end, where ancient authors often summarized their work or introduce upcoming subjects to be explored.
Literary Gifts Waiting To Be Opened
“The significance of reading this scroll is that it demonstrates that all of them have the potential to be read,” University of Kentucky computer science professor Brent Seales said in an interview. “The reason we wrap gifts at the holidays is to enhance the wonderful pleasure and surprise of receiving a gift. These literary gifts from antiquity can now be opened, and must be, if we are to discover exactly what stories they tell.”
Seales co-founded the Vesuvius Challenge with Nat Friedman, former CEO of software and coding platform GitHub and a current adviser to Midjourney, which makes the generative AI imaging tool of the same name. Friedman approached Seales at a Silicon Valley conference with the idea for the Vesuvius Challenge, and Seales developed the virtual unwrapping software used in the contest.
The rise of AI, and the growing familiarity with it, has been crucial to the success of the Vesuvius Challenge, said Seales, who added that due to technological advancements, a mere 10 years ago would have been too soon for the revelations announced this week.
“We have so little of what was actually written,” Seales said of the scrolls’ content. Every new work that can be read “moves the needle substantially on the corpus of known classical material.”
More Scrolls Left To Be Excavated
The Mount Vesuvius eruption has long fascinated archaeologists, historians and the general public. Excavators rediscovered the Herculaneum Papyri in the 1750s in a villa thought to be previously owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. Philodemus is thought to have been the villa’s philosopher-in-residence. Two levels of the home have yet to be excavated, which could mean the discovery of many more manuscripts.
The text revealed so far represents just 5% of one scroll, Friedman noted on X, formerly known as Twitter. This year, the goal of the Vesuvius Challenge is to decode entire scrolls, Friedman said, announcing a new $100,000 grand prize for the first team able to read at least 90% of all four scrolls that have been scanned.
“Our hope,” Friedman said, “is that the success of the Vesuvius Challenge catalyzes the excavation of the villa, that the main library is discovered, and that whatever we find there rewrites history and inspires all of us.”
