Researchers have been able to generate an image of text from inside a scroll that was buried in ash with the ancient city of Herculaneum by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that also destroyed Pompeii -- a major breakthrough in deciphering its contents.
The papyrus scroll, known as PHerc. 172, is one of three housed at Oxford's Bodleian Libraries and researchers have been seeking to "unroll" the scroll using digital technologies, including artificial intelligence, to learn more about the ancient world.
"The astonishing strides forward made with imaging and A.I. are enabling us to look inside scrolls that have not been read for almost 2,000 years," Richard Ovenden, the director of Oxford's University Libraries, said in a statement.
The first word that has been interpreted from the text is an Ancient Greek word for "disgust," which appears twice within a few columns of text, researchers revealed. Other words discovered so far are "fear" and "life."
The discovery is part of the Vesuvius Challenge, a global competition launched in 2023 that awarded cash prizes to researchers who could help decipher the carbonized scrolls of Herculaneum, after they had been scanned by an A.I. model programmed to detect ink on the surface of the papyri.
The Bodleian Libraries collaborated with Vesuvius Challenge researchers in refining the imaging process, after Diamond Light Source, a synchrotron science facility in Oxfordshire, to x-ray scan PHerc. 172 in July 2024 with a light that is some 100 billion times more intense than a standard x-ray machine.
"For the past several months, our team and community have been working hard on ink detection and segmentation of P.Herc. 172 from the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford," the Vesuvius Challenge said in a blog post on its own website.
The contents of the scroll are being interpreted by researchers at Oxford. Their preliminary insights indicate the scroll was likely authored by Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher and poet who died in Herculaneum just over 100 years before the volcanic eruption. Researchers said the way the word "foolish" is written in the text is characteristic of him.
The team praised the scroll above others found at Herculaneum because it contains small amounts of visible ink, making its contents likely much easier to decipher, even by eye.
The Herculaneum scrolls were discovered in the 1700s and are a collection of 800 carbonized texts found in the library of a grand villa believed to have been the property of Julius Caesar's father-in-law.
This particular scroll, believed to be a completed book and not a work in progress, was donated to Oxford in the early 19th century by Ferdinand IV, King of Naples and Sicily.
"This scroll contains more recoverable text than we have ever seen in a scanned Herculaneum scroll," Vesuvius Challenge cofounder Brent Seales said in a statement. "Despite these exciting results, much work remains to improve our software methods so that we can read the entirety of this and the other Herculaneum scrolls."
A group of students made a major breakthrough in the Vesuvius Challenge in late 2023 by detecting ink patterns in a scroll, which allowed researchers to extract words for the first time. The first word detected was the word "porphyras," an Ancient Greek word for purple.
Some researchers speculate that these texts may include works by Aristotle and other ancient writers whose contributions have only been preserved in fragmented form.
"The astonishing strides forward made with imaging and A.I. are enabling us to look inside scrolls that have not been read for almost 2,000 years," said Richard Ovenden, director of the University Libraries. "This project is a perfect example of libraries, humanities, and computer science complementing each other's expertise to understand our common past."