AI has helped read a 2000-year-old scroll consumed by volcanic ash — and this could help rewrite what we know of antiquity
When Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD erupted in Italy, it buried the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum – and hundreds of scrolls – in volcanic ash. Thanks to one student’s machine learning model, we may soon have a way to read them.
21-year-old computer scientist Luke Farritor built an algorithm that detected Greek letters on one of the papyrus scrolls, with the first word it successfully translated being “purple.”
This technologically induced leap comes after centuries of attempts to understand what was in the scrolls, which has culminated in recent years in the Vesuvian challenge.
How AI helps us understand the past
As a result of his efforts, Farritor was awarded $40,000 for reading more than ten characters in a small area. There is also a top prize of $700,000 available for reading four or more passages from a rolled scroll – which the Vesuvius Challenge organizers say is now “absolutely achievable”.
Efforts to use AI to understand what the scrolls contain date back to 2019, and Stephen Parsons’ work to detect ink from CT scans using machine learning models. This inspired Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross to take on the challenge.
Earlier in 2023, a participant, Casey Handmer, found a pattern that resembles ink in an unopened scroll – in the form of a ‘crackle’ pattern. This was a huge breakthrough, as they were the first of nearly 2,000 people to see ink in the scroll.
Farritor then began training a machine learning model on the crackle pattern, and with each new crackle, the model became more sophisticated and could reveal more crackle – evidence of ink and real lettering.
The model then began to detect cracks that the naked eye couldn’t see, and they began to form more letters and whole words. His machine learning model eventually found enough evidence to find the word porphyras, which means purple.
Another participant, Youssef Nader, also discovered the same word in the same area and received a second prize of $10,000. The organizers are keen to combine the various efforts to generate an even more effective discovery and translation engine to reveal the secrets of the scrolls and shed more light on this fascinating era of history.