When the Mount Vesuvius volcano erupted in Italy 2,000 years ago, incinerated ancient documents were revealed to be works written by Greek philosophers. This scroll-like dried document was excavated in the 18th century, but it was in such a charred state that it was impossible to read. It was on the verge of turning into powder when forcibly unfolded.
Scientists captured the document layer by layer using X-rays and sequentially extracted ink traces on the inside using computers. The deciphered letters revealed that it was part of "On Vice," written by Philodemus, a philosopher of the Epicurean school from the 1st century B.C. Medical imaging technology became a time machine that resurrected the past from 2,000 years ago.
◇Ancient document found in the villa of Caesar's father-in-law
The Vesuvius Challenge noted on the 6th (local time) that two researchers in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning received a $60,000 prize for being the first to reveal the title and author of the charred papyrus scroll from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
On Aug. 24, 79 A.D., the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Italy erased everything in Pompeii, a resort for Roman aristocrats. The nearby city of Herculaneum met a similar fate. Documents in a luxurious villa and library owned by Julius Caesar's father-in-law, who opened the doors to the Roman Empire, were also buried beneath volcanic ash.
The scroll, whose author and title have been deciphered this time, was discovered in 1752 in the library of Caesar's father-in-law's villa among hundreds of papyrus scrolls. It was nicknamed 'Banana Boy' because it resembled the shape of a banana. Although there was an opportunity to see ancient Greek and Roman literature firsthand, opening the door to the ancient was not easy. This was because the scrolls were charred like charcoal due to the high heat during the volcanic eruption. Unfolding the scroll would have turned it to ash.
Marcel Ross of Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg in Germany, and Mica Novak of Grey Swan AI, an internet security company in Pennsylvania, USA, decoded the letters on the scroll using an artificial intelligence (AI) model commonly used for medical image analysis.
Kenneth Lapatin, a curator of ancient artifacts at the Getty Museum in the United States, evaluated in the international journal Nature that "this work will be a milestone in efforts to read ancient scrolls discovered at the archaeological site of ancient Roman Herculaneum."
◇X-rays and AI reveal the authors of charred ancient documents
Professor Brent Seales of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Kentucky, along with donors from Silicon Valley, launched the Vesuvius Challenge competition in 2023, offering a prize of $1 million to anyone who could decode the scrolls excavated from Herculaneum. Major figures from Silicon Valley, including former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, founder of Safe Superintelligence, joined together.
Ross and Novak scanned the scrolls housed in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford using a particle accelerator from the "Diamond Light Source," similar to the method used to view the human body through X-rays. The two annotated the ink traces found within the scroll and trained the AI model by marking areas with and without ink. After several training sessions, the AI was able to discern the ink invisible to the human eye and produce images that clearly read the manuscript's title.
The recently decoded scroll is presumed to be Volume 1 of Philodemus's "On Vice." It not only contained Greek words translated as "confusion," "fear," and "revulsion," but also referenced perfume and barbershops as part of metaphors or anecdotes, which served as evidence. Professor Michael MacOscher, a papyrologist at University College London (UCL) who served as a judge for the Vesuvius Challenge, expressed confidence that "researchers are soon going to read the entire scroll" and remarked on the "really astonishing speed of the work."
Professor Brent Seales of the University of Kentucky first revealed the contents of the Herculaneum papyrus through X-ray imaging in 2015. Since then, the charred scrolls have been photographed using thousands of X-ray images at the Diamond Light Source, the largest scientific facility in the UK. The data size for one scroll reaches 11 terabytes.
The next step is akin to viewing the internal body through CT (computed tomography) imaging. The X-ray images capturing the cross-sections of the scrolls are combined on a computer and reconstructed into virtual 3D images. During this process, the AI distinguishes between the densities and chemical properties of the ink and papyrus to locate the actual letters. People then interpret the meaning by reading the letters and comparing them with ancient texts.
The Vesuvius Challenge revealed that three university and graduate students who deciphered over 2,000 characters were selected as winners of the 2023 competition and received $700,000. This document is also believed to have been authored by the philosopher Philodemus. He wrote in the scroll that "like in the case of food, I do not believe that what is scarce necessarily gives us more pleasure than what is abundant." One of the winners found the first Greek word meaning "purple" in the 2023 scroll and received the "first letter prize" of $40,000.
References
Vesuvius Challenge, https://scrollprize.org/grandprize