Using high-resolution X-ray imaging and artificial intelligence, scientists have for the first time virtually unrolled the surviving portion of an entire scroll scorched in the Mount Vesuvius eruption of 79 CE, viewing its contents from beginning to end without opening it and making the text available for scholarly study.
The achievement marks a milestone for the Vesuvius Challenge, an international effort launched in 2023 that taps machine learning and computer vision to decipher the contents of scrolls burned in the volcanic eruption that buried the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum in 20 feet of ash.
Previously, Vesuvius Challenge winners have decoded fragments from these rolled-up records of classical antiquity, but an entire scroll could produce even more insights into how our ancestors lived and thought 2,000 years ago.
Researchers have turned to technology to unroll the scrolls virtually since physically unfurling these fragile documents risks destroying them.
The newly unlocked scroll, known as PHerc. 1667, sustained damage to its outer layers during attempts to unroll it by hand in the 19th century and again in the 1960s and 1980s. Because of this, parts remain illegible. But the sections that can be read between gaps where the surface is lost point to a philosophical treatise on ethics, arts and human nature. The virtually unwrapping revealed almost 5 feet of continuous text across 20 columns.
‘Nor Anything Bad, Let Alone Ugly’
“Such being the goods for us, even from the opposite evils there will be neither anything good, let alone beautiful, nor anything bad, let alone ugly, nor happiness,” reads one excerpt translated from Greek. Another reads, “We will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature.”
A quote like that one “seems so apropos,” University of Kentucky computer science professor Brent Seales, co-founder of the Vesuvius Challenge, said in an interview. “Understanding of each other comes through an understanding of ourselves, training and practical wisdom that we should nourish and hold onto as a way to view the world.”
PHerc. 1667, which measures about 3 inches tall, is among about 800 scrolls known as the Herculaneum Papyri housed in a library in Naples, Italy. Federica Nicolardi, assistant professor in papyrology at the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, said it likely reflects Stoic thought, though it comes from an entirely Epicurean collection, making the researchers more cautious about immediately classifying it as a remnant of Stoicism.
“This is one of the oldest Roman/Greek scrolls ever discovered,” Seales said. “There were books on the shelf that were hundreds of years old when Vesuvius erupted. And we found one.”
Revealing What Fire Sealed Away
Unwrapping an entire scroll presented challenges. It involved viewing not just easily legible parts, but compressed sections with faint ink that’s difficult to decipher and required better algorithms and improved scanning quality.
“Reading scrolls is harder than reading fragments because one has to preserve the continuity for meters,” Giorgio Angelotti, project lead at the Vesuvius Challenge, said in an interview.
The Vesuvius disaster and its immense human toll continue to fascinate historians and the public millennia later. Researchers say the PHerc. 1667 breakthrough is only beginning when it comes to making preserved but unseen text accessible.
“We intend to apply this to all scroll scans currently in hand and to new scans as we can acquire them,” Seales said. “Automation is improving and models are improving with more and more data. We are accelerating.”