Discoveries

February 20, 2024

Reading the Unreadable

Listen to Today's Edition

Artificial intelligence recently deciphered part of a 2,000-year-old charred scroll found in the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum, a breakthrough that some scholars say could “rewrite the history” of the ancient world, NBC News reported.

Earlier this month, three computer-savvy students won a $700,000 prize for using AI to help distinguish ink inside the Herculaneum papyri.

The ancient documents consist of a collection of 800 rolled-up Greek scrolls that were carbonized during the eruption of Italy’s Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE – an event that also buried Herculaneum and nearby Pompeii with volcanic ash.

Previous efforts to open up the scrolls failed, prompting scientists to come up with creative ways to unveil them.

The recent breakthrough was part of the “Vesuvius Challenge,” a global competition launched to unravel the scrolls’ mysteries. Led by Professor Brent Seales, a team from the University of Kentucky pioneered a technique combining X-ray tomography and AI to virtually unwrap the scrolls and reveal hidden ink.

After 18 teams entered the competition, three students – Luke Farritor, Youssef Nader, and Julian Schilliger – emerged as the winning trio.

Their machine-learning algorithms deciphered 2,000 letters from one of the scrolls, shedding light on topics such as music and pleasure, possibly authored by Epicurean philosopher Philodemus.

Contest organizers added that the scroll’s author concluded his writing by throwing shade at “unnamed ideological adversaries – perhaps the stoics? – who ‘have nothing to say about pleasure, either in general or in particular.’”

The next phase of the challenge will be to unveil the remaining 90 percent of the ancient text.

This story originally appeared in the February 20, 2024 newsletter, Disaster, in Slow Motion.