AI Decodes Ancient Charred Scrolls from Mount Vesuvius Eruption

For nearly two thousand years, the charred remains of the Herculaneum scrolls sat unreadable, destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Now, an international team of researchers and students has used advanced 3D X-ray scanning and artificial intelligence to finally read the hidden text, unlocking a lost library of ancient philosophy.

The Tragedy of 79 AD and the Villa of the Papyri

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, it completely buried the ancient Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum under millions of tons of volcanic ash and pumice. In Herculaneum, a massive luxury estate known today as the Villa of the Papyri took the brunt of a superheated pyroclastic surge. The intense heat, estimated at over 600 degrees Fahrenheit, flash-fried the estate’s massive library of papyrus scrolls.

Instead of burning entirely to ash, the lack of oxygen caused the scrolls to carbonize. They turned into solid lumps of charcoal.

In the 1750s, Italian farm workers digging a well discovered the buried villa. Excavators eventually pulled over 800 carbonized scrolls from the ruins. For centuries, researchers tried to open them physically. These early attempts were disastrous. Because the scrolls were incredibly brittle, pulling them apart caused them to crumble into dust, destroying the text forever. The remaining scrolls were placed in storage at the National Library of Naples, completely inaccessible to historians.

The Vesuvius Challenge: Crowdsourcing a Solution

The breakthrough in reading these scrolls came from a unique global competition called the Vesuvius Challenge. Launched in March 2023, the project was created by Dr. Brent Seales, a computer science professor at the University of Kentucky, alongside technology investors Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross.

The founders secured high-resolution 3D X-ray scans of four intact scrolls using a particle accelerator at the Diamond Light Source facility in Oxfordshire, England. They released these massive digital files to the public and offered a $1 million prize pool to anyone who could extract readable text from the scans.

On February 5, 2024, the Vesuvius Challenge announced the winners of its $700,000 Grand Prize. A team of three young researchers accomplished what historians previously thought was impossible. The winning team included:

Luke Farritor: A college student and SpaceX intern from the University of Nebraska.
Youssef Nader: A PhD student studying machine learning at the Free University of Berlin.
Julian Schilliger: A robotics student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

Together, they successfully decoded over 2,000 Greek letters from the digital scans. This amounted to about 5% of a single scroll, organized into 15 columns of text.

How Machine Learning Read the Unreadable

Reading a closed, burned scroll requires two distinct technological steps: virtual unwrapping and ink detection.

Virtual Unwrapping

Before anyone can read the text, computers must figure out the physical shape of the papyrus. The CT scans from the particle accelerator map the scroll at a resolution of 8 micrometers (about the width of a red blood cell). Julian Schilliger developed software that acts like a digital scalpel. The program traces the microscopic layers of the rolled, crumpled papyrus within the 3D scan and flattens them out on a computer screen. This process is called segmentation.

Training AI to See Invisible Ink

Once the digital papyrus was unrolled on a screen, the researchers faced a massive problem. The ancient Romans wrote using a carbon-based ink made of soot and water. Because the ink is made of carbon, and the burned papyrus is also made of carbon, the ink is completely invisible to standard X-rays.

This is where artificial intelligence stepped in. Luke Farritor and Youssef Nader trained machine learning models to look for microscopic changes in the physical texture of the papyrus. Even though the X-ray could not see the color of the ink, the AI learned to spot subtle patterns (like dried, cracked mud) where ink had soaked into the plant fibers before the eruption. The AI highlighted these subtle texture changes, making the invisible Greek letters light up on the screen.

What the First Decoded Text Actually Says

Papyrologists from around the world eagerly translated the newly revealed 2,000 characters. They determined that the scroll contains a philosophical treatise discussing the Epicurean school of thought. Experts believe the text was written by Philodemus of Gadara, a philosopher who lived in the Villa of the Papyri during the 1st century BC.

The decoded text explores the relationship between pleasure, scarcity, and abundance. Specific findings in the text include:

Mentions of food, specifically focusing on whether expensive ingredients provide more pleasure than cheap ones.
A specific reference to capers, a common Mediterranean ingredient.
Discussions on music and how different sounds affect the human experience.
The Greek word “porphyras” (purple), which historians used to confirm the translation was accurate.
The author criticizing rival philosophers who fail to properly define what brings joy to life.

The Future of the Herculaneum Papyri

The success of the 2023 Vesuvius Challenge is only the beginning. The 2,000 decoded letters represent a tiny fraction of just one scroll. There are still hundreds of intact, unopened scrolls sitting in the National Library of Naples, and archaeologists believe thousands more remain buried deep beneath the unexcavated sections of the Villa of the Papyri.

In early 2024, Nat Friedman announced the next phase of the Vesuvius Challenge. The new goal is to automate the digital unwrapping process and successfully read 90% of all four scanned scrolls.

Because this villa belonged to Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus (the father-in-law of Julius Caesar), historians are highly optimistic about what remains hidden. The unread scrolls could contain lost plays by Sophocles, missing historical accounts by Livy, or completely unknown philosophical texts that will rewrite our understanding of the ancient world.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Herculaneum scrolls? The Herculaneum scrolls are a collection of over 800 papyrus documents that were burned and buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. They were discovered in the 1700s inside a Roman estate called the Villa of the Papyri.

Why couldn’t historians just unroll the scrolls? The intense heat from the volcanic eruption turned the scrolls into solid blocks of charcoal. Any attempt to physically unroll them causes the papyrus to crack and crumble into dust, which destroys the text.

How did artificial intelligence read the text? Researchers took 3D X-ray scans of the rolled scrolls. They then used machine learning software to detect microscopic physical changes on the surface of the papyrus where carbon-based ink had dried, allowing the computer to highlight the invisible letters.

Who won the Vesuvius Challenge? A team of three young researchers (Luke Farritor, Youssef Nader, and Julian Schilliger) won the $700,000 grand prize in February 2024 by successfully decoding 15 columns of Greek text from a scanned scroll.