AI helps decipher 2,000-year-old burnt scroll from Roman Empire
AI helped scientists read a 2,000-year-old scroll burned by Vesuvius (photo: Unsplash)
Students were able to decipher an ancient scroll that was practically burned up during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. This was done with the help of artificial intelligence, writes Vesuvius Challenge.
Opening details
In the 18th century, about a thousand papyrus manuscripts were discovered during excavations in the ancient city of Herculaneum, near Pompeii. It is believed that these manuscripts were stored in the library of a luxurious Roman villa, which may have belonged to the father-in-law of Julius Caesar.
However, due to the impossibility of reading the black ink and the fragility of the charred papyri, researchers temporarily abandoned attempts at decipherment, fearing to damage the documents.
The result of an attempt to physically unfold the scroll (photo: Vesuvius Challenge)
A breakthrough in solving this mystery came thanks to the Vesuvius Challenge, launched in 2023 by Brent Sills of the University of Kentucky and sponsors from Silicon Valley. Participants were offered to decipher the text of the scroll from a photo taken using computer tomography in order to win $700,000.
Three students from Germany, the US and Switzerland were able to do this by using artificial intelligence to develop algorithms and technology for virtual deployment of CT images.
Text invisible for 2000 years (photo: Vesuvius Challenge)
Contents of scroll
The scroll contained more than 2,000 Greek letters referring to various sources of pleasure, including music and food. The text also reflects on how wealth and fear affect them. For example, the thinker notes that even delicious food does not bring pleasure if there is enough of it.
One of the scrolls (photo: Vesuvius Challenge)
And the author ends with a parting shot at his philosophical opponents: "have nothing to say about pleasure, either in general or in particular, when it is a question of definition."
Professor Bob Fowler, after studying the decipherment, suggested that this text could have been written by the ancient Greek poet and Epicurean philosopher Philodemus. According to him, the style is very rough, which was characteristic of his works.
Earlier we wrote that archaeologists found burials from the Ice Age.
