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ERCOLANO, ITALY - 8 FEBRUARY 2024: Skeletons of residents who tried to escape following the eruption of the Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 are seen here in one of the six boat chamber of the ancient seafront of Herculaneum in Ercolano, Italy, on February 8th 2024.

Researchers have successfully retrieved a words and excerpts from a papyrus scroll that has not been read in almost 2,000 years. The techniques used to extract this hidden text could lead to the recovery of lost classical works. The scrolls, carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius - which buried Pompeii and deluged Herculaneum with hot gases and volcanic mud in A.D. 79 - are too fragile to open. A new approach, developed by a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, uses computer tomography and artificial intelligence to distinguish ink from papyrus and reconstruct missing text. If the entire contents of the scrolls can be recovered, it could have profound implications for classical scholarship.

A cache of some 800 scrolls - which look like wrinkled lumps of coal - was discovered in 1752 by workers excavating a grand villa in Herculaneum thought to have been owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar. Scholars who tried to unroll them stopped after finding that their methods destroyed the scrolls while yielding very little text. The new approach used to read the scrolls has been developed over the past 20 years by Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky. It uses computer tomography, the same technique as in CT scans, plus advancements in artificial intelligence.

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©2024 Gianni Cipriano
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2024-02-08-DIEZEIT-Herculaneum-Scrolls
ERCOLANO, ITALY - 8 FEBRUARY 2024: Skeletons of residents who tried to escape following the eruption of the Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 are seen here in one of the six boat chamber of the ancient seafront of Herculaneum in Ercolano, Italy, on February 8th 2024.<br /> <br /> Researchers have successfully retrieved a words and excerpts from a papyrus scroll that has not been read in almost 2,000 years. The techniques used to extract this hidden text could lead to the recovery of lost classical works. The scrolls, carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius - which buried Pompeii and deluged Herculaneum with hot gases and volcanic mud in A.D. 79 - are too fragile to open. A new approach, developed by a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, uses computer tomography and artificial intelligence to distinguish ink from papyrus and reconstruct missing text. If the entire contents of the scrolls can be recovered, it could have profound implications for classical scholarship.<br /> <br /> A cache of some 800 scrolls - which look like wrinkled lumps of coal - was discovered in 1752 by workers excavating a grand villa in Herculaneum thought to have been owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar. Scholars who tried to unroll them stopped after finding that their methods destroyed the scrolls while yielding very little text. The new approach used to read the scrolls has been developed over the past 20 years by Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky. It uses computer tomography, the same technique as in CT scans, plus advancements in artificial intelligence.