Reading an entire ancient scroll without ever opening it
Article excerpt
For almost 2,000 years, the carbonized library of Herculaneum has kept a cruel bargain: its scrolls survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, but only by becoming too fragile to open. To read one was to destroy it. Hundreds of rolls have therefore remained sealed, their contents preserved yet unreachable. The Vesuvius Challenge is a machine […]
For almost 2,000 years, the carbonized library of Herculaneum has kept a cruel bargain: its scrolls survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, but only by becoming too fragile to open. To read one was to destroy it. Hundreds of rolls have therefore remained sealed, their contents preserved yet unreachable.
The Vesuvius Challenge is a machine learning and computer vision competition to read the Herculaneum scrolls.
We have completely virtually unwrapped and read PHerc. 1667, the scroll the Vesuvius Challenge community knows as Scroll 4, without ever touching its pages. It is the first Herculaneum papyrus to be digitally unrolled and read in full, end to end, and made available for sustained scholarly study.
PHerc. 1667 began as a blackened, rolled mass of carbonized papyrus. To read it, we never unrolled it physically. Instead, we scanned it with high-resolution X-rays, reconstructed the wound sheet inside the volume, flattened it into a readable surface, and used machine learning to bring out the faint traces of ancient ink.
This is what open science makes possible. The virtual unwrapping of the Herculaneum scrolls was pioneered at EduceLab by its principal investigator, Professor Brent Seales. In 2023 Seales opened his lab’s imaging and software technology to the Vesuvius Challenge, a public, donation-funded effort he co-founded with Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross to read the scrolls in the open, and from there a global community took up the problem. The first letters and the 2023 Grand Prize were won by contestants from across the world.
What is less widely known is what happened next. Most of the Vesuvius Challenge research team first arrived as contestants. They entered the open competition, won prizes for the breakthroughs they made, and were then recruited onto the team that has now read an entire scroll. The people behind this breakthrough are, in large part, the global community the Challenge itself created.
PHerc. 1667 is one scroll. Hundreds more remain sealed, an entire library of philosophy, poetry and prose waiting to be read for the first time since antiquity. The method shown here is built to scale, and everything needed to apply it is open.
If you want to help read the rest of the library:
Read the science: the preprint (PDF), also on arXiv.
Get the data and code: scrollprize.org/data and GitHub.
Join the effort: get started and become part of the community reading the scrolls.
Read more on the project site.