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After using artificial intelligence to uncover the first word to be read from an unopened Herculaneum scroll, a team of researchers has uncovered several nearly complete passages from the ancient text that shed light on philosophy dating back nearly 2,000 years.
The Herculaneum scrolls consist of hundreds of papyri that survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. In their charred state, the ancient documents would crumble if anyone attempted to open them, and the inscriptions on the surviving fragments would be nearly unreadable to the human eye.
Using computer technology and advanced artificial intelligence, researchers can now analyze the Herculaneum scrolls without opening them and risking damaging the highly sensitive documents. More than 2,000 characters — the first complete passages — have been deciphered from a scroll, computer scientists announced Monday by launching the Vesuvius Challenge, a competition designed to accelerate discoveries on the scrolls.
“It’s incredibly gratifying to know that these things exist and that we now have a mechanism to read them, and that reading them will create a whole field of study and scholarship for classicists,” said computer science professor Brent Seales. University of Kentucky and co-creator of the Vesuvius Challenge.
The first word read from an unopened scroll was found separately in October by Luke Farritor and Youssef Nader, a computer science student at the University of Nebraska and a biorobotics graduate student at Freie University Berlin, respectively. This year, the trio, joined by Julian Schilliger, a robotics student at ETH Zurich, won the competition’s $700,000 grand prize by being the first team to decipher more than 85% of the characters in four continuous passages within the same scroll.
Moreover, the team went well beyond the competition requirements and read 15 columns of partial text, accounting for approximately 5% of the scroll.
The trio revealed the text by applying a technique known as “virtual unrolling” to rolled parchment, one of several owned by the Institut de France, which was posted on the competition’s website. The process involved using computed tomography, an X-ray procedure, to scan curled, distorted papyrus; This allowed the researchers to nearly flatten the scrolls and detect ink on the page with advanced artificial intelligence. After Farritor, Nader and Schilliger found the Greek letters, expert papyrologists were brought in from England, France and Italy to evaluate the text.
“If you look at the vocabulary (of the pieces), you see a really nuanced, intellectual conversation going on here. … It excites me to want to deliver an absolutely pristine, complete copy of this to scientists so they can do their work and we can fully understand it,” said Seales, who first developed the unpacking method and has been developing the technology for nearly 20 years.
Sayings of an ancient philosopher
More than 1,000 charred scrolls were seized as a result of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, located near the Italian city of Naples and covering the ancient Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum with volcanic mud. The charred documents, now referred to as the Herculaneum scrolls, were recovered from a building believed to be the home of Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, according to the University of Kentucky.
The announcement stated that the recently decrypted passages were taken from the end of a scroll and revealed words written by the philosopher Philodemus, who worked in the library where the scrolls were found.
In the deciphered text, Philodemus writes about whether “pleasure” and the abundance of goods available affect the amount of pleasure they give. The first sentence reads: “As with food, we do not readily believe that scarce things are certainly more pleasant than abundant things.”
“Philodemus was dismissed over the years because we were unable to read his passages thoroughly. But we can barely get these small particles. … (In these passages) he persuades the people who listen to him to kind of relax, to find good company, to spend their time living in the moment and enjoying pleasures,” said Roger Macfarlane, a professor of classical studies at Brigham Young University who studied the Herculaneum scrolls. Macfarlane was not involved in the discovery but was involved in approving the first word, which emerged in October.
Seales said he hopes to decipher nearly an entire scroll this year, and the new grand prize competition sets an even more ambitious goal by offering a $1 million cash prize to the first team that can decipher at least 90% of four scrolls. scrolls posted on the competition’s website.
“The winners of the Vesuvius Challenge will be able to obtain a text that is original but does not cause the scroll to be destroyed. And that’s probably the most miraculous thing about it,” Macfarlane said.
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