AI gives first tantalising look inside a 2,000- year-old Roman scroll
The contents of a 2,000-year-old charred scroll from the Roman town of Herculaneum have been viewed for the first time thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) and X-ray technology.
The document is one of the scrolls that have been damaged by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD and is too delicate to be physically unrolled.
It's part of a project called the Vesuvius Challenge, a competition to read ancient scrolls that began in 2023 by Brent Seales, a computer scientist from the University of Kentucky, and backers from Silicon Valley.
The thick paper-like material called papyrus can't be physically opened as it would fall apart.
The researchers uncovered a pretty big chunck of the papyrus and some columns of writing.
One of the first words to be translated was the Ancient Greek διατροπή meaning ‘disgust,’ which appears twice within a few columns of text.
Researchers from Oxford University are currently undertaking a study to further interpret the written information.
How does this technology operate?
The scroll was placed inside a synchrotron, a machine that utilises electrons to generate a potent X-ray beam which can scrutinise the scroll without causing damage.
The scan creates a 3D pic and the AI looks for the ink, which then turns up in digital form. The AI works like a copyist from the 18th century, duplicating what it copies.
This scroll is the most intact roll of written text uncovered in a Herculaneum scroll scan to date, according to Seales, Co-Founder of Vesuvius Challenge and Chief Investigator at EduceLab.
“We’re stoked with the findings, but we’ve still got a lot of work to do to make our software able to read the whole of these and the other scrolls from Herculaneum,” he said.
Hundreds of scrolls that are blackened by fire were found in Herculaneum, smothered under volcanic ash. The Oxford University's Bodleian Library holds several of the scrolls.
"It's a really big moment in history as library people, computer whiz blokes and scholars of the ancient times are working together to unlock the secrets of the past," Richard Ovenden, Bodley's Librarian and head of the University Libraries, said.
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