A.I. Is Decoding a Mysterious, Ancient Herculaneum Scroll at Oxford
- The scroll is part of the Villa of the Papyri library in Herculaneum, believed to hold significant philosophical and literary texts by ancient Greek and Roman scholars.
Another Herculaneum scroll is being deciphered using X-ray imaging and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms by a team competing in the Vesuvius Challenge . Among the ancient Greek words identified so far are ἀδιάληπτος (foolish), διατροπή (disgust), φοβ (fear), and βίου (life).
The ancient Roman town Herculaneum was encased in volcanic ash following the 79 CE eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Of particular interest is a massive library, known as the Villa of the Papyri, belonging to Julius Caesar's father-in-law Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus. The 1,785 papyrus scrolls from the library are thought to contain significant philosophical and literary texts by preeminent ancient Greek and Roman scholars.
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The Vesuvius Challenge is a competition with monetary prizes offered to those who can help decipher the scrolls using AI technology, as the charred scrolls cannot be unfurled.
The scroll currently being deciphered, known as PHerc. 172, is housed at the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.
"The scroll offers hints pointing to its likely author being our favorite philosopher in residence: [the Epicurean poet] Philodemus. There's a bit of early evidence that points us in this direction: the letter-forms present in this book suggest it was written sometime in the first century BCE and are of similar shape to handwriting found in other books attributed to him," the Vesuvius Challenge announced on Wednesday.
The scroll was first x-rayed in a synchrotron machine in an Oxford laboratory. The scan from the procedure was then used to create a three-dimensional reconstruction, which was analyzed by AI. This scroll was trickier than others, however, as the ink used to write on this scroll is more dense, making it more difficult for the computer to detect it.
"We're confident we will be able to read pretty much the whole scroll in its entirety," project lead Stephen Parsons told the BBC . "We can tell the entire scroll is full of text. Now we can work on making it show up more clearly. We're going to go from a handful of words to really substantial passages."
An earlier challenge successfully completed last February revealed passages in another Herculaneum scroll, a previously unknown philosophical work on the senses.
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