AI Unlocks 2,000-Year-Old Herculaneum Scrolls Buried by Mount Vesuvius

In the summer of 79 A.D., Mount Vesuvius erupted with such force that it buried the Roman town of Herculaneum under a blanket of superheated ash and pumice. Among the structures destroyed was a villa believed to have belonged to Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, Julius Caesar's father-in-law. Inside that villa lay roughly a thousand papyrus scrolls—philosophical texts, personal correspondence, records of daily life—all of it carbonized in an instant and left to sit in darkness for nearly two millennia.

A farmworker discovered the scrolls in the 18th century, but their contents remained largely inaccessible. The heat had transformed the papyri into brittle, blackened fragments. Some scrolls had been painstakingly unrolled by a monk over several decades, revealing Greek philosophical writings. But most remained sealed, their text invisible to the eye and seemingly lost forever. Richard Janko, a classical studies professor at the University of Michigan, explained the scale of the problem plainly: reassembling and reading the fragmented scrolls would require piecing together thousands of charred pieces—like assembling an intricate mosaic. At that pace, he said, the work could take five centuries.

The breakthrough came not from traditional archaeology but from a competition. In 2023, Brent Seales, a professor at the University of Kentucky, launched the Vesuvius Challenge, offering a million dollars in prize money to anyone who could devise a way to read the remaining 270 sealed scrolls, most of which are housed in a library in Naples, about eight miles from Herculaneum. Seales had already developed a technique called virtual unwrapping, using X-ray tomography and computer vision to read ancient texts without physically opening them. But the ink on the Herculaneum scrolls presented a different problem: it was chemically distinct from medieval inks and nearly invisible even under X-ray examination. Seales' team had created an artificial intelligence solution in 2019 that could detect the ink, but scaling the process required more data and more hands than his small group could manage.

Eighteen teams entered the competition. The winning entry came from three students: Luke Farritor from the United States, Youssef Nader from Egypt, and Julian Schilliger from Switzerland. They trained machine-learning algorithms on high-resolution 3D scans of the papyri, teaching the AI to recognize the subtle chemical signatures of ancient ink. After segmenting a scroll into analyzable sections, their model identified inked regions and decoded the text beneath. The result was extraordinary: they extracted two thousand letters from a single scroll, revealing passages that had not been read in nearly two thousand years. The judges, including Janko, awarded them the seven-hundred-thousand-dollar grand prize.

The text they recovered came from the final fifteen columns of the first scroll and appears to have been written by Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher. The passages discuss music, food, and the pursuit of pleasure—core themes of Epicureanism, which emphasized modest enjoyment of life's simple goods rather than excess. Notably, Philodemus also criticized unnamed philosophical rivals, likely the Stoics, for their silence on the subject of pleasure. These were not marginal fragments but substantive philosophical arguments, preserved in the ash for nearly two millennia and now readable again.

Giancarlo del Mastro, a papyrology professor at the University Campania Luigi Vanvitelli in Naples, called the technique revolutionary. He and his colleagues had worked intensively to interpret the newly revealed text, and he expressed astonishment at what the AI had made visible. The implications extend far beyond this single scroll. The same method can now be applied to the 270 remaining sealed scrolls in the Naples library—potentially unlocking vast repositories of ancient knowledge: philosophy, science, medicine, personal letters, administrative records. What was thought to require centuries of painstaking manual labor may now be accomplished in years. The ash that buried Herculaneum kept its secrets for nearly two thousand years. Artificial intelligence has given them back.