Reading 2,000-Year-Old Scrolls from Herculaneum's Ruins
How AI may cause a renaissance of the written word
On February 5th, a new initiative called the Vesuvius Challenge unveiled the winners of its competition to read papyrus scrolls carbonized during the volcanic eruption almost two millennia ago. High-resolution CT scans of the scrolls were accessible to the contestants along with a million-dollar prize pool. Three students from Egypt, Switzerland, and the United States collaborated to win the grand prize for developing AI technologies that successfully read four passages.
The announcement received some press, but not enough because this is a huge deal. Scholars estimate that 95% of the texts from ancient Greece and Rome are lost, so the recovery of even a single piece of ancient writing would be remarkable. Now contemplate how 800 carbonized scrolls are stored in Naples, and they may all be readable within a few years.
Origin of the scrolls
The scrolls were discovered in 1752 in the so-called “The Villa of the Papyri,” the only library from antiquity to have ever been found by archaeologists. The villa was below the town of Resina, which,1,671 years earlier, was called Herculaneum, a seaside town near Pompeii where wealthy Romans had summer homes. Lucius Calpurnius Piso most likely built the massive villa. He was Julius Caesar’s father-in-law and the patron of Philodemus, a scholar of Epicurus who had groups of followers in Naples and Herculaneum.
The Bay of Naples in the first century would have been fertile ground for the Epicurean philosophy of a life free from fear and anxiety. Decades of civil war left many Romans weary of life in the capital, instigating a movement south to the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, where they could grow grapes and olives and live a quieter life by the Tyrrhenian Sea. Epicureans believed physical pleasures were good, and the newly read passages of the scrolls discuss food and music, particularly capers.
However, they also believed the mind creates a higher level of joy, which can look backward and forward to reminisce about happy moments and anticipate future ones. Epicureans said all matter was composed of atoms constantly in motion, governed by immutable laws, except for the “clinamen” – the sudden swerve of atoms at no fixed place or time. The swerve means our fates are not sealed, and humans are free. There’s no point in fearing the gods because they are unconcerned with the petty affairs of mere mortals.
But it must have seemed like Jupiter was enacting his wrath when Mount Vesuvius erupted on October 79 C.E. Around 1 pm, a few centimeters of ash suddenly fell on the city. Simultaneously, millions of tons of volcanic debris shot up at least 10 miles from the earth’s core into the atmosphere. Citizens of Herculaneum would have been watching the column in the sky and the dark cloud moving eastward to Pompeii. Around midnight that night, a thunderstorm of fire and boiling mud, what is officially called the pyroclastic flow, landed on Herculaneum, quickly sealing the city and anyone who hadn’t already left under four stories of debris. More flows continued over the next day, sealing Herculeanum beneath 90 feet of cement-like volcanic material.
Because the first pyroclastic flow from Mount Vesuvius was so intense, the scrolls inside the Villa of the Papyri were carbonized rather than incinerated. John Seabrook, in his 2015 New Yorker article about the scrolls, describes it best:
“The Herculaneum papyri survived only because all the moisture was seared out of them—uncharred papyrus scrolls in non-desert climates have long since rotted away. In each scroll, the tightly wrapped layers of the fibrous pith of the papyrus plant are welded together, like a burrito left in the back seat of a car for two thousand years.”
The library is discovered.
The story goes that in 1750, a farmer digging a well accidentally discovered the Villa of the Papyri. Two years later, the scrolls were found. More likely, the villa was uncovered by treasure hunters aware of the terrific treasures that emerged from the ground during the construction of the royal palace at neighboring Portici. The Bourbon Kings of Naples officially sponsored Herculaneum and Pompeii’s excavations, which gave birth to the Neoclassical movement. The “Grand Tour” of aesthetes and elites from Northern Europe went south to see the ancient world unearthed and plunder the artwork.
Herculeanum’s state of preservation was and remains high, as everything was sealed airtight. In contrast, Pompeii was battered by a rain of small stones for two days before the pyroclastic flow overcame the city. Karl Weber, a Swiss architect and engineer, made tunnels to enter the Villa of the Papyri. Astonishing bronze sculptures emerged, which anyone visiting Naples absolutely must see.
Weber created a map of the house, which inspired John Paul Getty to realize the design on his property in Malibu, California, which would also host his collection of antiquities. Today, the Getty Villa is a beautiful and almost eerie time machine to the first century because the vegetation and sunlight are similar to Southern Italy.
People have been trying to read the scrolls almost since they were discovered. Like the Dead Sea Scrolls found in the 1940s, many dozens were initially tossed away until an advisor to King Carlo of Naples advised him to study the scrolls more closely.
Papyrologists (yes, that’s a job) shudder when they hear the name Camillo Paderni, the first person who tried to unroll the scrolls by slicing them in half like hot dogs.
Shortly after, Father Antonio Piaggio from the Vatican Library came to the palace at Portici and invented an unrolling machine that could unfurl about a centimeter a day. The first words of Philodemus emerged, and it was speculated that these may be the scrolls he brought from Athens to Italy with the writings of Epicurus.
In 1801, King Carlo returned to his native Spain to rule, making his son Ferdinand the King of Naples. He was married to Maria Carolina, sister of Marie Antoinette, and they made a diplomatic gift of six scrolls to Napoleon Bonaparte, hoping to make nice and avoid invasion. It may have worked for a while, but in 1806, Napoleon’s troops invaded, and the royal court fled to Sicily.
The British helped restore the Neapolitan monarchy, and Ferdinand gifted eighteen scrolls to George IV. The gift was reciprocated with eighteen kangaroos from the new British colony in New South Wales. The kangaroos went to live in the zoo inside the palace of Portici, right next to Herculaneum. When the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies fell with the unification of Italy in 1861, Naples lost its place as an international center of culture, and many decades of economic catastrophe and depopulation followed.
“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
Since the 19th century, there have been other attempts to read the scrolls, usually with chemical interventions, which only caused more destruction. A significant breakthrough was made by Brigham Young University, where scientists used multi-spectral technology to read the black ink against the charred black surfaces.
The Vesuvius Challenge comes from many years of hard work and vision by computer scientist Dr. Brent Seales from the University of Kentucky. Dr. Seales has had to build coalitions of scholars to navigate the stern gatekeepers in museums and libraries. Precious material like the scrolls needs tight guarding, but sometimes bureaucracies can be overrun by their own rules. (Also, the slang term for the storerooms in Naples is Sing Sing about the penitentiary outside of New York City, where prisoners never again see the light of day.) He developed technologies to virtually “unwrap” the scrolls and led the charge to obtain high-resolution CT scans from the Diamond Light Source X-ray facility near Oxford. The scanned scrolls offered to contestants in the Vesuvius Challenge were housed in France and are likely the same ones gifted to Napoleon.
Applying machine learning to read the scrolls is a project that requires a wide range of expertise, money, and momentum, making this alliance of academia and Silicon Valley ideal. The ink detection code developed by the contest winners will be made Open Source, as will future technologies, allowing the innovations to compound each other.
What’s next?
The scrolls were found primarily in one room at the Villa of the Papyrus, with shelving to accommodate them. They also found carrying boxes, indicating that the scrolls were being moved when the ash first fell on Herculaneum. Piso, the villa’s first owner, and Philodemus were dead long before 79 C.E., but the villa continued to be used as a study center or a library. This means there is much more to be found, likely on the villa's lower levels, which have remained untouched for two thousand years. Unknown writings of Virgil or Cicero could be there, or an original of The Aeneid, Italy’s founding myth.
A different administrative body manages the Herculaneum ruins than Pompeii, where new excavations yield history-changing discoveries almost daily. The effort and cost of maintaining what is already unearthed is tremendous. With the responsibility of world heritage in the hands of a few underresourced archaeologists, there is no plan to uncover the Villa of the Papyri further. But that may change as the scrolls are read, and a full excavation is one of the stated goals of the Vesuvius Challenge.
Will it happen? This renaissance of the hand-written word created by AI is the swerve.
This is a superb piece Danielle! The kind of writing I so look forward to from Tante Belle Cose! And to think I might see the Villa of Papyri soon…Keep up th great work. My classical training wonders what remains to be found; my skepticism of AI is reduced when reading things like this.
Extraordinary. Thanks for laying it out so clearly.