Student uses AI to decipher word in ancient scroll from Herculaneum

A computer science student has discovered the first decipherable word in unopened scrolls from Herculaneum, an ancient Roman town buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius

By Jeremy Hsu

13 October 2023

The Greek word for “purple” has been extracted from a Herculaneum scroll

Vesuvius Challenge

Almost 2000 years after they were buried by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, scrolls from a library in the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum have begun to reveal their secrets. The tightly wrapped papyrus scrolls were charred in the disaster, which also destroyed the nearby town of Pompeii. But by studying 3D X-ray scans of the scrolls, researchers have deciphered a word on one of them: “porphyras”, meaning “purple”.

The breakthrough came from Luke Farritor, a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His success involved training an AI to identify nearly invisible ink-like patterns in the 3D scans.

“Seeing Luke’s first word was a shock,” says Michael McOsker at University College London, who was not involved in the discovery. “It was immediately convincing, like ‘Good lord, that’s Greek.’”

Advertisement

Read more

Proteins in human bones near Pompeii survived temperatures of 500°C

Farritor analysed the 3D scans as a competitor in the open-source Vesuvius Challenge, which is awarding a series of prizes for deciphering the scrolls. He submitted his discovery in August.

At almost the same time, Youssef Nader, a data science graduate student at the Free University of Berlin in Germany, independently discovered the same word using a different AI technique to detect possible letter shapes within the scroll image segments. This provided an even clearer picture of the scroll segment, and is already yielding new, clear images of others. McOsker described Nader’s first word snapshot as “even more impressive” than Farritor’s.