A set of ancient texts destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD has been deciphered thanks to a team of researchers using AI.
The nearly 2,000-year-old document was rendered illegible after it was charred in a villa in the Roman town of Herculaneum, near Pompeii.
The document was discovered in an ancient villa in the town of Herculaneum. (Vesuvius Challenge)
A document believed to have belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law was carbonized by the heat of the volcanic debris.
Ancient documents remained undiscovered for centuries until Italian farmers discovered the villa in the mid-18th century.
Approximately 5% of the scrolls have been deciphered. (Vesuvius Challenge)
Many of the scrolls were very delicate and were destroyed during early attempts to unfold them. These were found to contain philosophical texts written in Greek. Hundreds more remain unopened and unreadable.
A breakthrough was made last year when Dr. Brent Shields led a team at the University of Kentucky and used high-resolution CT scans to unravel the text. Still, the black carbon ink on the letters made it impossible to decipher them from the papyrus itself.
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Shields teamed up with high-tech investors to launch the “Vesuvius Challenge,” offering a $1 million grand prize to the team that could recover four 140-character passages from the Herculaneum scrolls.
Berlin doctoral student Youssef Nader, SpaceX intern and student Luke Fariter, and Swiss robotics student Julian Schillinger collaborated to build an AI model that uses pattern recognition to decipher the lettering. .
The scrolls are very delicate and will break if you try to unravel them. (Vesuvius Challenge)
Through their efforts, approximately 5% of the first scroll was deciphered. This text, believed to have been written by the philosopher Philodemus, discusses the concept of pleasure, considered the highest good in Epicurean philosophy.
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“As with food, we don’t immediately believe that things that are in short supply are absolutely more enjoyable than things that are in abundance,” the author writes, noting that those things are easier for us. It’s a lot.
“Such questions will be considered frequently,” the authors write.
