AI Decodes Ancient Scrolls Burned by Mount Vesuvius

For nearly 2,000 years, a library of ancient wisdom lay buried under 60 feet of volcanic mud. When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, it destroyed the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. While the heat incinerated organic matter in Pompeii, it carbonized hundreds of papyrus scrolls in Herculaneum, turning them into fragile lumps of charcoal. Attempting to open them physically has always resulted in their destruction. Now, a historic breakthrough using artificial intelligence and high-resolution scanning has finally revealed the text inside, bridging a millennia-old gap in human history.

The Vesuvius Challenge

The recent success is largely due to the “Vesuvius Challenge,” a global competition launched in March 2023. The project was founded by tech entrepreneurs Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, along with computer scientist Brent Seales from the University of Kentucky. Their goal was simple but ambitious: create a prize pool to incentivize developers to decipher the scrolls without touching them.

The challenge provided competitors with high-resolution CT scans of the scrolls and the necessary software toolkit. The results were stunning. In early 2024, a team of three students—Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor, and Julian Schilliger—claimed the $700,000 Grand Prize. Using machine learning models they developed, they successfully read more than 2,000 Greek characters from a single scroll.

Who Cracked the Code?

The winning team was a diverse group of young researchers who met online through the competition’s Discord server:

• Luke Farritor: A 21-year-old student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who became the first person to detect a complete word in the scroll.
• Youssef Nader: An Egyptian PhD student in Berlin who refined the AI models to clear up the imagery.
• Julian Schilliger: A robotics student from Switzerland who focused on the 3D mapping of the papyrus sheets.

How Virtual Unwrapping Works

Reading a scroll that looks like a burnt log requires a process called “virtual unwrapping.” Professor Brent Seales has spent two years perfecting this non-invasive technique. It involves three primary steps that combine physics and computer science.

1. High-Resolution CT Scans

The scrolls were scanned at the Diamond Light Source in the United Kingdom. This facility is a particle accelerator that produces X-rays 10 billion times brighter than the sun. These intense beams allowed researchers to create a 3D volume of the scroll at a resolution of roughly 8 micrometers per voxel. This is detailed enough to see the texture of the papyrus fibers.

2. Segmentation and Flattening

This is the most labor-intensive part of the process. The 3D scan shows a tangled mess of wrapped papyrus sheets. The internal structure is not a perfect spiral; it is crushed and distorted. Researchers must digitally trace individual layers of the papyrus through the 3D data. These traced layers are then “flattened” into 2D images.

3. Ink Detection via AI

This is where the Vesuvius Challenge made its biggest leap. In ancient times, writers used carbon-based ink (made from charcoal and water) on carbon-based papyrus. Because the densities are almost identical, regular X-rays cannot easily distinguish between the paper and the ink.

However, the ink sits slightly on top of the fibers. The winning AI models analyzed the texture of the flattened surfaces. The machine learning algorithms noticed a subtle “crackle” pattern where the ink had dried. By training the AI on small fragments where ink was visible to the naked eye, the software learned to predict the presence of ink on the hidden, internal layers of the scroll.

Uncovering the Philosophy of Pleasure

The text revealed by the AI is a philosophical treatise. Historians and papyrologists believe the author is Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher who lived in Herculaneum. The scroll discusses the nature of pleasure, music, and food.

In one translated passage, the author challenges the stoic idea that scarcity increases value. The text loosely translates to: “As in the case of food, we do not immediately believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant.”

This discovery confirms that the library at the Villa of the Papyri—the massive estate where the scrolls were found—was a center of Epicurean study. The owner of the villa is widely believed to be Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar.

Why This Changes History

The potential of this technology extends far beyond a single scroll. The Villa of the Papyri is the only intact library known from the classical world. While the deciphered text is in Greek, archaeologists are hopeful that other scrolls in the collection contain Latin texts.

Currently, we have lost vast amounts of ancient literature. For example:

• Sophocles: Wrote 120 plays, but only 7 survive.
• Livy: Wrote 142 books of Roman history, but only 35 survive.
• Sappho: Most of her poetry is lost to time.

There are approximately 800 scrolls currently held in Naples that have never been read. Furthermore, many archaeologists believe thousands more scrolls remain buried in the unexcavated sections of the villa. If the AI technique can be scaled up, we could effectively double the amount of literature we possess from antiquity.

What Comes Next?

Following the success of the 2023 Grand Prize, the Vesuvius Challenge has announced its next phase. The goal for 2024 and 2025 is to scale the process. While the winners proved it is possible to read the text, the process currently requires significant manual effort to trace the papyrus layers.

The next stage of the competition focuses on “auto-segmentation.” This involves creating AI that can automatically trace the complex, crushed layers of the scroll without human intervention. The organizers aim to read 90% of four separate scrolls by the end of the next cycle. If successful, this project will move from a proof-of-concept to a mass digitization effort, rewriting our understanding of the ancient past.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why can’t we just carefully unroll the scrolls? The scrolls have been carbonized by volcanic heat, effectively turning them into charcoal. If you attempt to unroll them physically, they crumble into dust immediately. Early attempts in the 18th and 19th centuries resulted in the destruction of many valuable artifacts.

What is the “crackle pattern” researchers talk about? This refers to the texture of the dried ink on the papyrus. Since the ink and the paper are both made of carbon, they look the same on an X-ray scan. However, the AI detected that the ink leaves a microscopic fractured texture on the surface of the fiber, which is distinct from blank papyrus.

Who owns the Herculaneum scrolls? The scrolls are the property of the Italian government. They are curated and stored by the National Library of Naples. The Vesuvius Challenge team works in partnership with the library and the Institute of France to access the scans.

Are there more scrolls to find? Most likely. The Villa of the Papyri has only been partially excavated. Historians suspect that the main library of the villa, possibly containing Latin texts, has not yet been found and remains buried underground in Herculaneum.