AI helps read papyrus scroll burnt to crisp during Vesuvius eruption

Previously hidden text revealed without unrolling scroll discusses stoic philosophy on ethics, art and human behaviour

The surviving part of an ancient scroll that was burnt to a crisp when Mount Vesuvius erupted nearly 2,000 years ago has been virtually unwrapped and read with help from artificial intelligence.

Researchers uncovered 20 columns of previously hidden text covering more than a metre of charred papyrus without physically unrolling the scroll. The work discusses stoic philosophy on ethics, art and human behaviour and dates to the second or late-third century BC.

The age of the scroll, named PHerc 1667, makes it one of the oldest in a collection of hundreds recovered from the library of a luxury Roman villa in Herculaneum that was blasted by heat and buried under ash in the volcanic eruption that destroyed nearby Pompeii in AD79.

The ordeal and historic handling took its toll on the scroll: at some point it was broken in half, while past efforts to unwrap the document caused the outer layers to flake off or disintegrate. What remains is half the size of the original at only 8cm tall and 2cm wide.

Dr Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples Federico II, said: “We don’t have the full scroll, but the surviving object was unwrapped and that’s a very important result because it shows that we are able to unwrap these objects completely.”

The achievement will be announced at a conference in Naples on Thursday and is the latest from the Vesuvius Challenge which launched in 2023 as a global contest to read some of the carbonised scrolls. The project has since handed out hundreds of thousands of dollars in prizes for teams that used artificial intelligence and other software to virtually unwrap the scrolls and read the text from high resolution X-ray images.

Much of the Herculaneum library was dominated by Philodemus of Gadara, a Epicurean philosopher and poet in the first century BC. But while the title and author of PHerc 1667 remain unknown, its older age and contents point to another author.

Analysis by Nicolardi and her colleagues suggests the text is a stoic treatise, perhaps authored by the Greek philosopher Chrysippus. He was the third head of the stoic school and has other works in the collection. The text refers to his nephew and pupil, Aristocreon.

“At first, we were saying this could be an Epicurean talking about stoic doctrine,” said Nicolardi. “But then I stopped and said, you know, if this was found outside of Herculaneum, we would categorise it as a stoic work.”

The Vesuvius Challenge was founded on work by Prof Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky. He showed how machine-learning algorithms could be trained to read the ink on the hidden layers of the scrolls by spotting subtle differences in the papyrus fibres in X-ray images. The contest, backed by Silicon Valley donors, attracted teams that honed the techniques for virtually unwrapping and reading the scrolls.

The newly read text discusses the stoic concept of hormē, or impulse, and warns that failing to regulate behaviour with reason can lead to harmful passions and diversion from one’s goals. Another concept is phronēsis or “practical wisdom”, the highest virtue a person can have in stoic philosophy.

In one passage, the author writes: “We will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature.” The line suggests that reason and the innate human inclination to do good were crucial for furthering one’s knowledge.

Another virtually unwrapped scroll contained the words “Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8”, revealing for the first time that On Gods was a multi-book work. Beforehand, only the first had been identified. “These unopened Herculaneum Scrolls look like dead books, but they’re not,” said Nicolardi. “They’re starting to speak again.”

Seales said the challenge had now shifted from the techniques needed to read the burned scrolls to the scholarly work to understand them. “People now know that this can be done and now we’re exploring what [the texts] actually mean,” he said. “For me that’s the world cup. I just won the world cup: that’s my victory.”