Scroll from the Villa of the Ancient City of Herculaneum: Charred but Readable

Photo: Salvatore Laport/ AP

When Mount Vesuvius spewed in 79 AD, he also buried the luxury villa of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, Julius Caesar's father-in-law, and an extensive library of papyrus scrolls in the ancient city of Herculaneum. For almost 2000 years, they remained buried under 20 meters of volcanic mud until they were discovered in the 18th century – but they are so fragile that they are almost impossible to open.

So how do you read a scroll you can't open? Nowadays with machine learning models. In 2019, a team led by computer scientist Brent Seales from the University of Kentucky created 3D X-ray scans of two papyrus scrolls and several fragments – at the beginning of this year, the team announced the "Vesuvius Challenge" and promised prize money to those who would first be able to read several letters or several passages of the writings from it.

This has now been achieved, independently of each other, by two computer science students, as announced on Thursday on the website of the Vesuvius Challenge: Luke Farritor in Nebraska and Youssef Nader in Berlin. Earlier, Casey Handmer, another participant, had found evidence of ink in the unopened scrolls.

The main prize is still open

According to the release, Farritor trained a machine learning model on the ink patterns identified by Handmer – and thus made several letters visible. On the picture he submitted, the word "Porphyras" is clearly legible. Nader came up with the same word with a different approach shortly thereafter. "Porphyras" means "purple" and is quite rare in ancient texts, the team writes: "If these words are indeed what we think they are, this papyrus scroll probably contains an entirely new text that the modern world does not know."

Farritor won $40,000 for it, Nader $10,000 for second place. The challenge is supported by technology entrepreneurs Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, who wanted to accelerate this technological progress with the call for proposals.

But in this first category of the challenge, it was only a matter of finding ten letters in an area of four square centimeters. For the main prize, at least four individual passages with continuous and plausible text must be identified by the end of the year – 700,000 dollars are offered for this. The team is now working this, it writes on the website. "Our optimism is at an all-time high."

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