This month, a trio of computer scientists won the Vesuvius Challenge, a competition to use artificial intelligence to reveal four passages from Ancient Greek that had been encased in a charred scroll for 2,000 years. The artifact was found in Herculaneum, a Roman seaside resort destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.
These are “kinds of things that happen about every half century,” Richard Janko, a professor of classics at the University of Michigan and one of the competition’s judges, told The Daily Beast. Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy and a fellow judge, told The Daily Beast that the discovery “could be a huge revolution.”
The technology allows archaeologists to potentially ‘see’ into ancient burnt, soaked and sealed texts. This includes works from classical antiquity, to hidden writings encased in Egyptian mummies, to books burned in World War II, to the many thousands of text fragments found in the Dead Sea that could shed new light on early history of Christianity.
Perfectly preserved by the volcanic eruption, the city is a kind of in-between space where destruction and conservation go hand in hand, Nicolardi said. Archaeologists have excavated parts of the Herculaneum for centuries, including the Villa Dei Papiri, from which approximately 1,800 cataloged fragments or entire scrolls have been recovered.
Herculaneum scroll with red laser lines being scanned at the Institut de France by Brent Seales and his team.
EducationLab.
However, the rollers are incredibly fragile. After all, they are old and also burned and charred. As a result, hundreds have been destroyed by people trying to roll them out manually or using machines. This leaves only a few hundred potentially available for reading.
That’s the genesis behind the competition: If the team could crack open one digitally, digitally unpacking everything else would be simple by comparison.
The contest was backed by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Y Combinator partner Daniel Gross, who offered a $1 million grand prize to the person or team who could generate at least four columns of readable digital text from scans of a Herculaneum scroll. 2023. The winning team consisted of AI engineers named Youssef Nader, Julian Schillinger and Luke Farritor, who managed to extract fifteen columns of text from the papyrus, revealing ancient Greek lines formatted like a newspaper.
The process they used was originally developed by Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky who has spent two decades using technology to digitally analyze and restore ancient texts. The tool, called the Volume Cartographer, uses AI to digitally extract the layers of a single burned papyrus scroll that Seales’ team had made 3D scans of.
This AI bot translates dead ancient languages into English
But the challenge is not over yet. The team’s winning entry reveals just five percent of a single scroll. For 2024, Friedman, Gross, and Seales have a new contest: Unroll an entire scroll to win a $100,000 prize. Ultimately, they want to digitally extract all remaining and intact Herculaneum scrolls.
If they can pull that off, the library could reveal new information about some of history’s most famous figures, like Aristotle and Archimedes. Janko added that the text that revealed the competition may have been written by Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher and teacher of the famous Roman poet Virgil.
But first, a larger part of the scroll must be segmented, which is the technical term for unraveling the digital layers of papyrus. Then there’s the matter of translating what they find, which can be a monumental task, but with the help of AI, potentially even less so. “Reading the papyrus is not just a matter of recognizing letters,” Nicolardi said. “It’s more a matter of understanding the text.”
The rise of the AI archaeologist
The use of computers and scanning techniques in archeology is not new. The first mummy to be analyzed using X-rays occurred in 1896. Such technology has since been used to uncover archaeological discoveries for more than a century. But before Seales’ digital unpacking tool, Janko estimated it would have taken at least 500 years to go through the Herculaneum scrolls.
Seales has solved the problem of unrolling the fragile rolls by using synchrotron scanning, which involves shooting the laser from a powerful particle accelerator at a roll and taking high-fidelity X-rays that show all its layers. From there, each layer must be picked and segmented. The inner layers are the easiest to take apart, Seales said.
“It was incredibly satisfying to see the youthful minds of people who really understand AI excited about the classics,” says Seales.
Although this protocol has only been used on these scrolls so far, it has a wide range of archaeological applications. For example, Seales has used the technology to digitally extract some Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as a copy of the Book of Leviticus recovered from a burned synagogue in En Gedi, Israel, dating to the third or fourth century AD.
He also plans to scan and decipher a still-sealed Egyptian papyrus scroll in the Smithsonian Collection. This artifact, bound with linen and sealed with wax, marked with the symbol of Amenhotep III, dates from about 1400 BC. and has never been opened.
Seales has also used the technique to spot burned medieval books recovered from the wreckage of Chartres, a French town near Paris that was largely destroyed in World War II during an Allied bombing campaign in 1944.
Another potential treasure trove could lurk deep in the Black Sea, Janko said. There are at least 67 old shipwrecks on the seabed that – because the water at a depth of about 140 meters contains no oxygen – never wrecked, causing them and their cargo to freeze in time. Below the potential treasure trove is a box of books and scrolls that could hold even more ancient historical secrets. Thanks to these technological advances, it could now be possible to retrieve those papyri and look inside them, Janko said.
It’s not just the classics that could see a renaissance in discoveries: There’s also the opportunity to apply the technology to old film reels and negatives that have corroded and can no longer be developed or read with traditional methods, Seales said.
For now, however, researchers are still working on a translation they are confident in for the fifteen columns they have so far. This is a process that even the most hubristic Silicon Valley evangelist can’t accelerate, Nicolardi explains. “I think there’s a moment for this kind of quick work and there’s another moment where you have to stop and think about it and think about it,” she said. The scroll itself makes much the same point. Nicolardi notes that the last sentence can be roughly translated as: “May the truth always be clear to us.”
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