With the help of artificial intelligence, researchers have uncovered hidden texts from a charred 2,000-year-old scroll from Mount Vesuvius. The scroll was burned during the volcano eruption in 79 AD in Pompeii. Citizen scientists and scholars have spent the past two years trying to reveal the once-hidden words in the Herculaneum scrolls.

The scroll in question is the PHerc. 172, one of thousands of scorched papyrus papers recovered in the 1750s. These papers were recovered from a Roman mansion in Herculaneum, a town that was engulfed in ash and debris from the Vesuvius eruption. Herculaneum is now a town called Ercolano, located roughly 10 miles north of Pompeii.

“The machine learning employed for this project focuses solely on the detection of the presence of ink,” according to a statement from the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries. “The models do not have any understanding of language and cannot recognize characters.” Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries house PHerc. 172 and two other Herculaneum scrolls.

Uncovering the Hidden Texts

Researchers believe the scrolls contain ancient literary and philosophical texts. However, there is still speculation surrounding what’s in them because they are too burned and fragile to unroll by hand. According to Smithsonian Magazine, many have tried in the last 250 years, though unsuccessfully. These ancient scrolls don’t even resemble paper. Instead, the scrolls look more like lumps of charcoal.

Therefore, researchers had to turn to technology and artificial intelligence to decode the ancient texts. They call it “digitally unrolling” the texts. They’ve already translated one word, “διατροπή,” which means “disgust” in ancient Greek and appears at least twice within the text.

Since early 2023, citizen scientists have tried to uncover the texts through the Vesuvius Challenge, a contest offering up to $1 million to anyone who could pick out words from the unreadable documents. The first breakthrough came in October 2023 when a computer science student decoded an ancient Greek word. Luke Farritor, who was 21 years old at the time, revealed “πορφύραc,” an ancient Greek word that refers to the color purple. He won $40,000 from his discovery.

Then, last February, Farritor collaborated with Youssef Nader and Julian Schilliger and revealed 2,000 characters from one of the Herculaneum scrolls. The trio split $700,000 for their accomplishment!

Now, the Vesuvius Project revealed “more recoverable text than we have ever seen in a scanned Herculaneum scroll,” said Brent a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky who’s been leading the effort to decode the scrolls. In total, researchers can see several columns of text, each made up of about 26 lines.

“We can tell the entire scroll is full of text,” said Stephen Parsons, who leads the Vesuvius Challenge, in an interview with BBC News. “Now we can work on making it show up more clearly. We’re going to go from a handful of words to really substantial passages.”