Scrolls that survived Vesuvius divulge first word — purple
From deep within a papyrus scroll that has not been read in almost 2,000 years and would crumble to pieces if unrolled, researchers have retrieved a handful of letters and a single word: “porphyras,” ancient Greek for “purple.”
Experts who announced the findings Thursday hope that the techniques used will enable them to electronically reconstruct the full contents of the many Herculaneum scrolls that have been preserved but are too fragile to open. The scrolls were carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 that buried Pompeii and deluged Herculaneum with hot gases and volcanic mud.
The scrolls, which look like wrinkled lumps of coal, come from a grand villa thought to have been owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar.
A cache of about 800 scrolls was discovered in 1752 by workers excavating the villa. Scholars who tried to unroll them stopped after finding that their methods destroyed the scrolls while yielding very little text. None has been opened since the 19th century.
The new approach used to read the scrolls has been developed over the past 20 years by Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky. It uses computer tomography, the same technique as in CT scans, plus advancements in artificial intelligence.
Unlike many ancient inks that contained metals, the ink used by the Herculaneum scribes was made from charcoal and water and is barely distinguishable from the carbonized papyrus on which it rests. Through constant refinements to Seales' technique, the latest being the use of AI to help distinguish ink from papyrus, the scrolls have at last begun yielding a smattering of letters.
The word “porphyras” was visualized in August by Luke Farritor, a 21-yearold computer science student; he won $40,000 for identifying 10 letters in the same small patch of scroll. A $10,000 prize went to Youssef Nader, a biorobotics graduate student who independently found the same word a few months later. Casey Handmer, an entrepreneur, won $10,000 for showing there was lots of ink within the unopened scrolls.
Seales expressed confidence that the whole contents of a scroll would be recoverable. His computer scans reveal dislocated strands that may have destroyed a few words, but he said software programs should be able to reconstruct missing text to the satisfaction of papyrologists.
The news that a first Greek word has been recovered and that entire scrolls are potentially readable could have profound implications for classical scholarship.
Most of the excavated scrolls come from a single room that seems to have contained the personal library of Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher.