AI helps read papyrus scroll burnt to crisp during Vesuvius eruption

The scroll was recovered from the library of a luxury Roman villa in Herculaneum, near Naples, that was blasted by heat and buried under ash in AD79. Photograph: Vicki Jauron, Babylon and Beyond Photography/Getty View image in fullscreen The scroll was recovered from the library of a luxury Roman villa in Herculaneum, near Naples, that was blasted by heat and buried under ash in AD79. Photograph: Vicki Jauron, Babylon and Beyond Photography/Getty AI helps read papyrus scroll burnt to crisp during Vesuvius eruption Previously hidden text revealed without unrolling scroll discusses stoic philosophy on ethics, art and human behaviour The surviving part of an ancient scroll that was burnt to a crisp when Mount Vesuvius erupted nearly 2,000 years ago has been virtually unwrapped and read with help from artificial intelligence. Researchers uncovered 20 columns of previously hidden text covering more than a metre of charred papyrus without physically unrolling the scroll. The work discusses stoic philosophy on ethics, art and human behaviour and dates to the second or late-third century BC. Unwrapping of Herculaneum scroll (PHerc1667) The age of the scroll, named PHerc 1667, makes it one of the oldest in a collection of hundreds recovered from the library of a luxury Roman villa in Herculaneum that was blasted by heat and buried under ash in the volcanic eruption that destroyed nearby Pompeii in AD79. The ordeal and historic handling took its toll on the scroll: at some point it was broken in half, while past efforts to unwrap the document caused the outer layers to flake off or disintegrate. What remains is half the size of the original at only 8cm tall and 2cm wide. View image in fullscreen Herculaneum scroll with red laser lines is scanned at by Prof Brent Seales and his research team. Photograph: EduceLab Dr Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples Federico II, said: “We don’t have the full scroll, but the surviving object was unwrapped and that’s a very important result because it shows that we are able to unwrap these objects completely.” View image in fullscreen A slide shows how the PHerc 1667 scroll is read by scientists using AI. The achievement will be announced at a conference in Naples on Thursday and is the latest from the Vesuvius Challenge which launched in 2023 as a global contest to read some of the carbonised scrolls. The project has since handed out hundreds of thousands of dollars in prizes for teams that used artificial intelligence and other software to virtually unwrap the scrolls and read the text from high resolution X-ray images. Much of the Herculaneum library was dominated by Philodemus of Gadara, a Epicurean philosopher and poet in the first century BC. But while the title and author of PHerc 1667 remain unknown, its older age and contents point to another author. Analysis by Nicolardi and her colleagues suggests the text is a stoic treatise, perhaps authored by the Greek philosopher Chrysippus. He was