Conny Waters – AncientPages.com – After almost 2,000 years, the first full word from the Herculaneum scroll has been deciphered by a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Nebraska.

On the morning of August 24, 79 A.D. Mount Vesuvius erupted and destroyed the ancient city of Pompeii. At the time of the destruction, Pompeii was a flourishing ancient city with magnificent houses, streets, and shops. Now, everything would remain lost, forgotten, sealed, and preserved in a time capsule for future generations.

One of the Herculaneum scrolls scientists are hoping to read with x-ray technology. PH๏τograph: Diamond Light Source/Digital Restoration Initiative, University of Kentucky

The Herculaneum Papyri, an ancient scroll fossilized by the Mount Vesuvius eruption has long intrigued scientists. The scroll had been unreadable since a volcanic eruption, and examining the papyri has been challenging. The document would crumble if anyone attempted to unroll it, and surviving pieces with writing were considered nearly illegible to the human eye — until now.

Thanks to University of Nebraska computer science student Luke Farritor, we now learn about the ancient scroll’s written content.

A team of researchers launched the “Vesuvius Challenge,” a compeтιтion designed to accelerate the discoveries made on the scrolls. The compeтιтors were told to apply a technique known as “virtual wrapping” to two rolled-up scrolls released on the site, in an attempt to decipher the hidden words.

Virtual unwrapping begins with computer tomography, an X-ray procedure that is used to scan each coiled-up, warped papyrus. After following along the curved layers in the scan, researchers then virtually flatten the scrolls and explore them using advanced AI that has been trained to find the ink on the page. The technology was created by University of Kentucky computer science professor Brent Seales and has been in development for nearly 20 years now.

However, efforts to decipher the scrolls have been going on much longer.

Farritor, who participated in the compeтιтion, developed a machine-learning algorithm that detected Greek letters on several lines of the rolled-up papyrus. Farritor used subtle, small-scale differences in surface texture to train his neural network and highlight the ink. Soon, the first word emerged! The word was “πορφυρας” or “porphyras,” which is the Greek word for purple.

“When I saw the first image, I was shocked,” says Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples in Italy and an academic committee member reviewing Farritor’s findings. “It was such a dream,” she says. Now, “I can actually see something from the inside of a scroll.”

The letters found were “πορφυρας” which is the Greek word “porphyras” and translates to the English word “purple.” Credit: Brent Seales

According to the University of Kentucky, approximately 1,100 carbonized scrolls, today known as the Herculaneum scrolls, were recovered from a building that was believed to be Julius Caesar’s father-in-law’s house. Known as the Villa dei Papyri, this site produced the only large-scale library to have survived from Greco-Roman antiquity and the only classical one found in situ.  These ancient scrolls offer us a unique window into the classical world. Unfortunately, the contents of this highly unique and valuable library remain largely unknown to this day.

“Most classical texts known today are the result of repeated copying by scribes over centuries. By contrast, the Herculaneum library contains works not known from any other sources, direct from the authors.

Until now, researchers were able to study only opened fragments. A few Latin works have been identified, but most of these contain Greek texts relating to the Epicurean school of philosophy.

There are parts of On Nature, written by Epicurus himself, and works by a little-known philosopher named Philodemus on topics such as vices, music, rhetoric and death. It has been suggested that the library might once have been his working collection. But more than 600 scrolls — most held in the National Library in Naples, with a handful in the United Kingdom and France — remain intact and unopened. And more papyri could still be found on lower floors of the villa, which have yet to be excavated,” a study published in Nature informs.

The University of Kentucky team scanned the Herculaneum scroll and took X-ray images of the inside. Credit: EduceLab

“Farritor and Youssef Nader, a biorobotics graduate student at Freie University Berlin, worked independently of one another and found the same word. They won the “First Letters Prize” of $50,000, but the grand prize of the Vesuvius Challenge — $700,000 for the first team that can read four continuous pᴀssages at the minimum length of 140 characters — is still up for grabs.

Seales hopes that a partially read scroll, satisfactory with the contest conditions, will be seen by the end of this year, while a whole scroll might be deciphered by the end of 2024,” CNN reports.

“This material goes back 2,000 years — there were people who wrote this,” Seales said. “They wrote about love, they wrote about war, they wrote about peace, they argued with each other. These manuscripts are dialogues that they’re having about philosophical views of the world.

“And so even if we learn nothing, but the deep connection that we have to the ancients in terms of humanity, that’s still significant.”

Using X-rays and machine learning, scientists can hopefully decipher more of the precious and interesting Herculaneum scrolls.

Written by Conny Waters – AncientPages.com Staff Writer