AI Helps Recover Text from Ancient Roman Scrolls Found at Herculaneum

Researchers announced Thursday that artificial intelligence has enabled the virtual unwrapping of ancient Roman papyrus scrolls recovered from Herculaneum, yielding new texts from works previously known only in fragments. The University of Kentucky's Stanley and Karen Pigman School of Engineering, working with the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli Vittorio Emanuele III, reported that experts virtually unwrapped the full scroll PHerc.

1667 and recovered more than 70 columns of text from another scroll.

The team identified two new books from ancient Rome and obtained sufficient material to support new critical scholarly editions. One newly revealed book shows that the philosopher Philodemus wrote an eight-book series, of which only one volume had been known before. PHerc.

1667 ranks among the oldest scrolls in the collection. The scrolls were found in the 18th century during excavations at a villa destroyed when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D. Their brittle, carbonized state had prevented physical unrolling for centuries.

In 2023 Brent Seales launched the Vesuvius Challenge, a competition that offered prizes for advances in reading the texts. Three college students extracted the first words from a carbonized scroll in 2024, though they interpreted only about 5 percent of one scroll. The second phase produced the results announced Thursday.

"For nearly two millennia, many of these texts have been physically preserved but intellectually inaccessible," Seales said. " "Today, we are hearing voices that have been silent for 2,000 years," he added. " Federica Nicolardi said the ability to read complete arguments rather than fragments marks a transformational shift for researchers.