Scholars use AI to decipher scrolls burnt to a crisp by Vesuvius

CLASSICAL scholars believe scrolls buried by Mount Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago could soon be deciphered and “rewrite” our understanding of antiquity after a group of students used artificial intelligence to reveal charred text.

The Herculaneum Papyri, held in a library thought to belong to the family of Julius Caesar, were turned to charcoal when the Roman town of Pompeii was buried by the volcanic eruption in AD 79. The collection is believed to contain thousands of ancient texts, possibly including works by Aeschylus, and Sappho, or even revelations around the early years of Christianity.

Since their discovery in 1752, most attempts to unfurl the charred scrolls and unlock their secrets have proved futile, with the carbonised lumps simply crumbling to ash.

But at least four passages have now been deciphered by three to students who used AI to develop a tool that allowed them to decipher 15 passages from digital scans of a seared scroll.

Luke Farritor, a student from Nebraska, Youssef Nader a PHD student in Berlin, and Julian Schilliger, a scholar in Zurich, developed the tool in response to a global challenge set by Nat Friedman, a US tech executive, and academic Brent Seales.

The trio will share the $700,000 (£554,000) grand prize. Mr Farritor, a computer science student at the University of Nebraska-lincoln, had already won $40,000 after he decoded the first letters on the scroll, spelling the Greek word for purple. Mr Farritor, 22, developed a machine-learning model that could detect ultra-faint differences in the texture of the carbonised scrolls to identify the presence of ink not visible to the human eye.

He enlisted the help of Mr Nader and Mr Schilliger to detect 15 passages comprising more than 2,000 characters, an estimated 5 per cent of the scroll’s text.

The Herculaneum Papyri were buried inside a villa it is believed belonged to Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, a Roman senator whose daughter Calpurnia was married to Julius Caesar. It constitutes the largest surviving library from the Greco-roman world. Most of what has proven legible has been attributed to Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher.

Thousands of the manuscripts were deemed irreparably damaged but classicists hope the technology could offer an invaluable window into antiquity.

Paul the Apostle is known to have passed through the region decades before the eruption, and scholars have said texts related to his visit could be contained within the collection. “Some of these texts could rewrite the history of key periods of the ancient world,” Robert Fowler, a classicist and the chair of the Herculaneum Society, said.

Early analysis suggests of the translation suggests it is a philosophical treatise on the pleasure of food and music. “In the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant,” the author writes.

Prof Fowler and other experts believe the newly deciphered texts to be another work by Philodemus.