Researchers using artificial intelligence and advanced imaging said on Thursday they had achieved the first complete reading of a closed Herculaneum scroll burnt by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago.
The breakthrough marks a major step toward deciphering hundreds of ancient manuscripts found at Herculaneum, the Roman town destroyed along with Pompeii in the 79 AD disaster.
Looking to speed up the scholarship, the Vesuvius Challenge, which is promoting new technologies to try to understand the carbonised text, said it would place all its data, code and models of the papyri online and offer a $1 million prize to the first person or team to read in full any other scroll.
"Just a year ago it would have been crazy for any of us to believe that there would be a complete scroll read completely non-invasively with hundreds of columns of text," said Brent Seales, professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky and one of the founders of the project.
"Today we have shown you that that is possible," he told a conference streamed from Naples. "I believe we're going to read every single one of the scrolls in the collection."
UNCOVERED TEXT EXPLORES ETHICS, ARTS AND HUMAN BEHAVIOUR
The blackened, fragile scrolls cannot be physically opened without severe damage. Researchers have instead used high-resolution scans and computational techniques to "virtually unwrap" them and detect ink on the papyrus layers.
So far, about 45 papyrus scrolls and scroll fragments have been scanned. More than 600 unopened scrolls remain, and large parts of the villa where they were discovered have yet to be excavated, raising the possibility that more could yet be found.
The Vesuvius Challenge has already awarded $1.8 million in prizes for work linked to unmasking the Herculaneum texts, but Nat Friedman, a U.S. technology executive and founding sponsor of the project, said new insight would lead to major advances.
"We think it is possible to dramatically improve the algorithms that we have ... and we think that the ink detection techniques that we're using could probably be greatly advanced," he said, encouraging more computing experts to get involved.
Among the new material presented on Thursday were 70 columns of text from "On Vices, Book 1", attributed to the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus.
Nearly 1.5 metres (5 ft) of readable text across 20 columns was also recovered from a document dated to 200-300 BC — the oldest Herculaneum scroll yet unwrapped — exploring ethics, arts and human behaviour.
Federica Nicolardi, lead papyrologist for the Vesuvius Challenge, said new technologies were transformative.
"Even with the most successful methods available ... to physically unwrap the scrolls and read them, one had to damage them. But with virtual unwrapping, we are no longer forced to choose between preserving and reading these extraordinary artefacts. We can do both," she said.
Nicolardi said progress was snowballing, with researchers in the last 24 hours unwrapping the full length of one scroll, producing about 140 columns of new text. Until recently, they were only uncovering about 10% of columns, she added.
"Literally last night, in front of Mount Vesuvius, something, or I should say everything, changed," she said.
