AI Helps Scholars Decipher A 2,000-Year-Old Scroll Destroyed by Mount Vesuvius

 

Nowadays, artificial intelligence is being used for practically everything. Unfortunately, experts in history and archeology may not be well-versed in the world of AI. So, to attract tech-savvy people to help apply AI practices in their own research, a pair of researchers developed the Vesuvius Challenge in hopes of doing the impossible using AI – burning ancient Decoding a Greek scroll without touching it.

vesuvius challenge

A luxury Roman villa in Herculaneum, believed to have belonged to Julius Caesar's father-in-law and containing hundreds of papyrus scrolls, burned down after the devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. More than 1,000 rolled-up Greek scrolls were carbonized in whole or in part during the eruption, leaving them looking like logs of hardened ash. When excavations of the area began in the 18th century, the scrolls were in such a fragile state that they would break when researchers tried to open them and the black ink that was visible was almost unreadable. Since then, the scrolls have been housed in the Institut de France in Paris and the National Library of Naples.

The Vesuvius Challenge was launched in 2023 and was developed by University of Kentucky computer scientist Brent Seals and GitHub founder Nat Friedman, requiring contestants to decipher four fragments of one of these Herculaneum Scrolls, containing at least Less than 140 characters were identified. At least 85 percent of the characters should be recoverable. Providing high-resolution CT scans of the scrolls, the pair backed the challenge with a $1 million prize to help motivate the researchers.

The team of researchers who cracked the code

Friedman announced that a team of three researchers won the $700,000 grand prize after deciphering more than 2,000 Greek letters from the scroll. Luke Ferriter, a student and SpaceX intern from Nebraska, won the challenge's $40,000 "first letter" prize after identifying the word "violet" in the first Greek scroll. Subsequently, he did his Ph.D. Worked closely with Yusuf Nadar. student in Berlin, and Swiss robotics student Julian Schilliger, to try to win the competition.

The team built on algorithms developed and released by SEAL to digitally open the scroll and detect ink on its surface. Together, they were able to identify over 2,000 letters, approximately five percent of the scroll, which is an incredible feat. “This has been an incredibly rewarding journey,” Nader said. “The adrenaline rush is what propels us forward. it was crazy. This meant working about 20 hours a day. I didn't even know when one day ended and another day began.”

Robert Fowler, emeritus professor of Greek at the University of Bristol and president of the Herculaneum Society, said their work is "a complete gamechanger" for businesses, as "there are hundreds of such scrolls waiting to be read." “This is the beginning of a revolution in Herculaneum papyrology and Greek philosophy in general,” said Dr. Federica Nicolardi, papyrologist at the University of Naples Federico II. It is the only library that has come down to us from ancient Roman times.

contents of scroll

This competition has allowed researchers to determine the contents of the scroll. The piece that emerged takes a philosophical approach to discussing the sources of pleasure, from whether pleasure is experienced by a combination of elements to what causes major or minor components, abundant or rare. This passage discusses pleasure in the form of food and music.

"It is probably Philodemus," Fowler said of the scroll's author. "The style is very vulgar, typical of him, and the subject matter is right up his alley." The author wrote, "In the matter of food, we do not immediately believe those things which are scarce to be at all more pleasant than those which are abundant." Fowler reflected on this passage, saying, "I think he's asking the question: What is the source of pleasure in the mixture of things? Is it the dominant element, is it the rare element, or is it the mixture itself?"

Going forward

The conclusion of the competition actually served as the beginning of a new movement to further study the Herculaneum Scrolls. To begin with, the challenge and research will continue on the same scroll with the intention of reading about 85 percent. In doing so, it will lay a solid foundation for deciphering the hundreds of scrolls already discovered and waiting to be read, as well as many more scrolls that are believed to still be buried in the villa. It is likely that more excavation will be done to retrieve these.

The next step for researchers is to fully automate papyrus surface detection, while also improving ink detection on more damaged parts of the scroll. "When we launched it less than a year ago, I honestly wasn't sure it would work," Friedman said. “You know, people say money can't buy happiness, but they have no imagination. It has been pure joy. What happened is magical, it could not have been scripted better.”