Three researchers recently received a $700,000 prize for their groundbreaking use of artificial intelligence (AI) to decipher a 2,000-year-old scroll that was damaged during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The scroll in question is part of the Herculaneum papyri, a collection of approximately 800 Greek scrolls that were carbonized during the volcanic eruption in 79 CE, which also buried the ancient Roman town of Pompeii.
Stored at the Institut de France in Paris and the National Library of Naples, these scrolls have suffered extensive damage, often crumbling when attempts were made to unroll them. In an effort to unlock their secrets, the Vesuvius Challenge was launched, involving high-resolution CT scans of four scrolls and offering a total of one million dollars in prizes to incentivize research.
The winning team, consisting of Youssef Nader, a PhD student in Berlin, Luke Farritor, a student and SpaceX intern from Nebraska, and Julian Schilliger, a Swiss robotics student, utilized AI to distinguish between ink and papyrus and employ pattern recognition to decipher the faint and nearly illegible Greek lettering.
The potential significance of these texts is immense, as Robert Fowler, a classicist and chair of the Herculaneum Society, stated that they could potentially rewrite key periods in ancient history. So far, the researchers have successfully decrypted around five percent of the scroll, with Farritor previously deciphering the first word from one of the scrolls, which turned out to be the Greek word for “purple.”
The author of the scroll is believed to be Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher, who wrote about various topics such as music, food, and the pursuit of life’s pleasures. The scroll was found in a villa thought to have belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, and it is believed that the property may contain thousands more manuscripts yet to be excavated.
The competition was initiated by Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, and Nat Friedman, the founder of Github, a software and coding platform acquired by Microsoft. The successful recovery of these ancient texts would be a remarkable breakthrough, considering that only an estimated 3 to 5 percent of ancient Greek texts have survived.
The next phase of the competition aims to leverage the researchers’ findings to unlock 85 percent of the scroll, opening up even more insights into the ancient world. This project marks the beginning of a revolution in Herculaneum papyrology and Greek philosophy at large, according to Federica Nicolardi from the University of Naples Federico II.
In conclusion, this groundbreaking use of AI to decipher ancient texts holds great promise for uncovering lost knowledge and reshaping our understanding of history.
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