Researchers Use AI to Digitally Unwrap a ‘Unreadable’ 2,000-Year-Old Vesuvius Scroll for the First Time

In a sun-drenched corner of Italy nearly two millennia ago, a catastrophe buried a treasure trove of ancient knowledge under a thick coat of volcanic ash. When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 C.E., it not only destroyed cities like Pompeii and Herculaneum but entombed a whole library in a Roman villa, its scrolls carbonized and lost forever, or did they? For decades, scholars could only dream of decoding these charred relics without destroying them in the process. But now, thanks to artificial intelligence and a stunning scientific effort, the dream is turning into reality. In a groundbreaking discovery, AI has helped reveal, for the first time ever, the title and author of one of these unreadable scrolls, according to Nature.

The text, known to researchers as PHerc. 172 and kept at Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries, was confirmed to be 'On Vices' by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus, a prominent figure of the first century B.C.E. This is no small victory; the discovery unlocks a piece of lost philosophical thought and proves that AI can decode our history without laying a finger on it.

The revelation earned Marcel Roth, a student at Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg, and Micha Nowak from Gray Swan AI in Pittsburgh, the $60,000 First Title Prize from the Vesuvius Challenge (an open science initiative aimed at decoding the sealed Herculaneum scrolls, as per Nature. Michael McOsker, a papyrologist at University College London, remarked, "It’s the first scroll where the ink could just be seen on the scan…Nobody knew what it was about. We didn’t even know if it had writing on," stated The Guardian.

The scroll in question is part of a collection discovered in 1752 inside the Villa of the Papyri, believed to have belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. Several scrolls were found, their contents sealed within carbonized shells too sensitive to be opened. For decades, the experts were in a dilemma; the more they tried to decode it, the more crusty and dusty it became. But all that changed in 2015, when experts successfully used X-ray tomography to scan and virtually unwrap a different scroll from En-Gedi. This paved the way for a stellar approach using micro-CT scans, machine learning, and many more ways to decode this mystery, stated Gizmodo.

McOsker remarked, "The pace is ramping up very quickly … All of the technological progress that’s been made on this has been in the last three to five years and on the timescales of classicists, that’s unbelievable. Everything we’re getting from the Herculaneum library is new to us," according to The Guardian. Intriguingly, the scroll’s full title is speculated to be 'On Vices and Their Opposite Virtues and In Whom They Are and About What,' making it kind of a self-help manual of older times. Maybe self-help was known to ancient people as well.

Moreover, Dr Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, remarked, "We’re seeing evidence of ink in many of the new scrolls we’ve scanned, but we haven’t converted that into coherent text yet…That’s our current bottleneck: converting the massive scan data into organised sections that are properly segmented, virtually flattened, and enhanced so that the evidence of ink can then be interpreted as actual text." With 18 scrolls already scanned and 20 more underway at facilities like the UK’s Diamond Light Source and France’s European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, researchers are hopeful to know the unknown.