Innovations in artificial intelligence are not only changing the present and supercharging a whole new future, they’re also revolutionizing the study of history. On stage at CHM Live, an expert panel shared groundbreaking work deciphering the Herculaneum scrolls, fragile ancient Greek texts burned in the same volcanic eruption that destroyed nearby Pompeii and were thought to have been lost forever.
A burnt scroll, still rolled up, from Herculaneum.
CHM Senior Producer and Manager of Programming Russell Ihrig moderated the fascinating discussion with investor and entrepreneur Nat Friedman, who co-launched the Vesuvius Challenge, Federica Nicolardi, assistant professor of papyrology at the University of Naples Federico II, and Brent Seales, the Stanley and Karen Pigman Chair of Heritage Science and professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky. The program was made possible by the generous support of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation.
In 79 CE, Herculaneum was a vibrant Roman city, says Federica Nicolardi. It had shops and tavernas, homes, public buildings, and even ancient fast food. The populace was used to being shaken by frequent earthquakes. Everything changed on August 24, when Mount Vesuvius erupted. The devastating effects of the volcano were different in the neighboring cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum—and key to the survival of the scrolls.
Federica Nicolardi describes the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
Buried in 60 feet of thick mud, the city was lost for 1,700 years, until Italian farmers digging wells began to find ancient statues and marbles. An official excavation began in 1738, but it was not conducted in the top-down method used by modern archaeologists. Instead, exploration was done by tunneling, which was difficult and dangerous, as the tunnels could collapse at any time.
When the Herculaneum scrolls were discovered in the ruins of a villa, it wasn’t clear what the compact, irregular, black shapes were. Then, when pieces began to come off and ink became visible, people tried to open them. Seales noted that over a 50-year span, various methods were used to attempt to unroll the scrolls, including with a specialized machine. The results varied widely.
Friedman tried to replicate the process at home with papyrus he bought on Amazon and cooked in a Dutch oven. The result was a flakey, light, very delicate object. Trying to cut it with a knife, soaking it in water, and pouring mercury into it—all methods tried in the 1700s—did not work very well and gave him an appreciation for the challenge.
A scroll that was unrolled physically.
The advent of photography starting in the 1860s helped make the contrast of the writing—essentially black on black—more readable, but since the early 2000s, there’s been a moratorium on further attempts to unroll the scrolls to prevent damage.
Seales had the idea to virtually unwrap those scrolls that hadn’t been opened at all by using a scanner. His team developed software to trace the surface of the scrolls and reconstruct where the glued sheets overlapped. Then they had to find the ink. They’d had a little success with machine learning computing models when Seales received a cold call from Friedman. The two hit it off, Friedman suggested they “open source” the ink challenge, and the Vesuvius Challenge was born.
Nat Friedman describes the Vesuvius Challenge.
The team hired a dozen people to look at cross section X-Rays of the papyrus to follow the spiral so they could provide flattened segments to the community to help make the challenge of finding the ink easier. While some contestants ran machine learning models, one took an unusual approach—he just looked at the X-Rays for hours until he began to identify patterns of cracks and realized it might be dried ink. That revelation was used by another contestant to train an ink detection model. Seales explains how critical AI has been to the project.
Brent Seales explains AI’s role in deciphering the scrolls.
The first word deciphered was “porphyra,” which means purple in Greek. Nicolardi notes that it’s an interesting word and hard to understand without context. Soon, however, pieces of five or six columns were deciphered and progress was rapid. Today, there are around 15 columns that are readable out of 160, and two thirds of the upper parts of those columns are decipherable. The Greek texts are likely from a specialized part of the Italian villa’s library and relate to Epicurean philosophy. Occurrences of the words “music” and “pleasure” are key.
A scroll that has been digitally "unscrolled."
There are hundreds of scrolls still to be examined, and many more are likely buried in the vast unexcavated areas of the Herculaneum site. The chance to restore entire works of ancient Greek and Latin texts rather than the fragments scholars usually find is a compelling challenge. And it’s exciting to imagine how the tech of the future is bringing the past into the present and could help to solve the mysteries that remain. In fact, it's enough to make anyone "scroll obsessed."
AI Decodes Ancient History | CHM Live, June 10, 2025
