A badly burnt scroll from the Roman town of Herculaneum has been digitally "unwrapped", providing the first look inside for 2,000 years.
The document, which looks like a lump of charcoal, was charred by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD and is too fragile to ever be physically opened. For decades, researchers believed they would never know what the scrolls contained. However, early last year, a team of three students won $700,000 for using artificial intelligence to read the first passages of a scroll burned in the volcanic eruption of 79 AD.
Their success was “met with widespread amazement” by the review team of papyrologists, according to the Vesuvius Challenge’s announcement. Its subject was Greek Epicurean philosophy, which teaches that fulfilment can be found through the pleasure of everyday things.
Today, a scroll from the Bodleian Library in Oxford, is undergoing even more intensive scrutiny using a combination of X-ray imaging and artificial intelligence to virtually unfurl it - revealing rows and columns of text. More work is needed to make the scroll fully legible to decipher its contents, but the team behind the project say the results are very promising.
"We're confident we will be able to read pretty much the whole scroll in its entirety, and it's the first time we've really been able to say that with high confidence," said Stephen Parsons, project lead for the Vesuvius Challenge, an international competition attempting to unlock the Herculaneum scrolls.
Some letters are already clearly visible in the ancient text and the team believes it's a work of philosophy, just like the portion of another scroll partially deciphered early last year by the students who won the Vesuvius Challenge.
Hundreds of carbonised scrolls were discovered in Herculaneum, which like its neighbour Pompeii was buried beneath metres of volcanic ash.