AI gives first tantalising look inside a 2,000- year-old Roman scroll

The contents of a 2,000-year-old burnt scroll from the Roman town of Herculaneum have been seen for the first time with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) and X-ray imaging. 

The document is one of many scrolls charred by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD and is too fragile to be physically opened.

It comes as part of a project called the Vesuvius Challenge, which is a competition to read ancient scrolls launched in 2023 by Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, and Silicon Valley backers.

The thick, paper-like material called papyrus cannot be physically opened as it would crumble. 

The researchers discovered a considerable part of the papyrus and some columns of text. 

One of the first words to be translated was the Ancient Greek διατροπή meaning ‘disgust,’ which appears twice within a few columns of text. 

Efforts are now underway by University of Oxford scholars to interpret more of the text. 

How does the tech work?

The scroll was placed inside a synchrotron, a machine that uses electrons to produce a powerful X-ray beam that can look into the scroll without damaging it. 

The scan creates a 3D reconstruction and then the AI looks for the ink, which then digitally appears. The AI works like 18th-century copyists, replicating what it sees.

“ This scroll contains more recoverable text than we have ever seen in a scanned Herculaneum scroll,” Seales, Co-Founder of Vesuvius Challenge and Principal Investigator of EduceLab said in a statement.

“Despite these exciting results, much work remains to improve our software methods so that we can read the entirety of this and the other Herculaneum scrolls,” he added. 

Hundreds of carbonised scrolls were discovered in Herculaneum, buried under volcanic ash. The University of Oxford's Bodleian Library holds several of the scrolls. 

“It’s an incredible moment in history as librarians, computer scientists and scholars of the classical period are collaborating to see the unseen,” Richard Ovenden, Bodley’s Librarian and Helen Hamlyn Director of the University Libraries, said.