How to read a book that you can’t open? This is precisely what University of Kentucky professor Brent Seales has spent his career trying to understand. And on Thursday, his life’s work was reached a peak: Seales, alongside a large group of volunteers and scientists working as part of the Vesuvius Challengehelped develop technology to see inside books and scrolls that we can’t open without destroying them.
To a press conferenceNat Friedman, a major backer of the Challenge and former CEO of GitHub, revealed several digitally unrolled reels of the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum, which was buried under lava by Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. One of the manuscripts, called PHerc 1667, can now be read in its entirety. “We were not only able to completely unroll this scroll, from cover to cover, but we were also able to extract almost all of the text and make it readable,” Friedman said.
The scroll was digitally unwrapped using a technique developed by Seales called Volume Cartographer, which takes scans of a 3D manuscript, layer by layer, then effectively flattens them into 2D images that can then be read. The scans are carried out by synchrotron scanners, which are huge particle accelerators capable of beaming high-power X-rays onto the object, revealing its internal layers down to the atomic level.
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Pherc. 1667 digitally unwrapped from start to finish, revealing 20 columns of continuous text.
Photo courtesy of Vesuvius Challenge.
What the Vesuvius Challenge did was take Seales’ work that spanned about two decades and accelerate it, partly by using artificial intelligence to help speed up and automate the work, and partly by inspiring a huge community of people to contribute to the Challenge.
“AI was a huge accelerator, and a huge accelerator, because the technique itself required a breakthrough to amplify how we could detect the ink inside of these scans,” says Seale. “To scale, we needed a way to create a set of labels – you know, here’s ink, here’s no ink – much more efficient than doing things by hand.”
AI coding agents also allow the research team to try new techniques much more quickly than if they had to write all the code themselves, he adds.
The achievement is remarkable given the condition of the parchment: Called PHerc. 172, the parchment looks like a delicate piece of charred wood. It was among hundreds of documents destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which wiped out Herculaneum and Pompeii, killing at least 1,500 people. As horrible as this disaster was, the volcanic ash also preserved everything in the towns where it was located, including the burned scrolls. They were found inside a villa known as Villa of the Papyrusor Villa of the Papyrus. Some 400 of these papyrus scrolls remain intact, Seales says. And now he and the Vesuvius Challenge can read them for the first time in almost 2,000 years.
“To restore these lost voices, I feel like I’m finding mine myself,” Seales says. Among the digitally unwrapped scrolls that the Challenge revealed Thursday is a previously unknown text by Philodemus, a prominent Epicurean philosopher, titled “On the Gods, Book Eight.” In fact, scholars did not know that Philodemus had written “On the Gods” volumes, much less eight of them.
Papyrologist Federica Nicolardi said at the same event on Thursday that the team had already identified a number of intriguing passages, including some on the nature of deities and providence. “These are no longer anonymous old books,” she said. “Imagine being able to retrieve the titles of hundreds of still unopened scrolls. It would be like reconstructing the catalog of an ancient library.”
Sliced image of Pherc. 172 of the micro-CT.
Vesuvius Challenge
The feat comes about two years after the Vesuvius Challenge first announced that three volunteers, Luke Farritor, Youssef Nader and Julian Schilliger, had managed to clearly spot the ink on one of the papyrus layers of the Herculaneum Scrolls, making it readable by papyrologists for the first time. The manuscript, a treatise on Epicurean philosophy also probably written by Philodemus, was completely unknown to scholars before the Challenge.
Seales says the Silicon Valley-backed competition may seem risky or unfamiliar to other academics used to more traditional research funding structures. But he was confident in all the work his University of Kentucky team had done before Friedman and Challenge co-founder Daniel Gross, a tech investor who led AI development at Apple, approached him.
“I maybe didn’t take this risk earlier in my career, but at the point where I’m at now, I felt like it was a really fun thing to try, and you know, it ended up being a home run,” he says. “I think it can serve as a model for other people who are in the right place at the right time.”
Today, Seales and his team have digitized 45 scrolls. Already, papyrologists are deciphering new texts that point to other possible authors in the Herculaneum collection, including one of the leaders of the Stoic school of philosophy. For Seales, this appears to be the moment when his work is indeed done – and others can now take the lead in reconstructing the voices contained in these scrolls.
“There’s this deep sense of completion that I haven’t felt in a very long time, because Vesuvius has been looming over my life for two decades,” says Seales.
“We always go into our fields thinking that the field we’re going into is really the one we’re going to change, right? But it turns out I’m changing fields from classical philology and papyrology, and I’m none of those things,” he says. “I created a group of people who look like me…I created a community and we’re going to share this experience, so it’s really awesome.”
Seales is excited to take this technology and apply it to collections of photographic negatives from the birth of photography, such as that of Eadweard Muybridge, whose 1878 “The Horse in Motion” is considered the first example of using photography to study a body in motion. These types of old negatives are often stored in boxes and are so fragile that they cannot be unrolled without destroying them, Seales says.
“I think we never quite understand the origins, do we? Like, what were these guys photographing on a bad day? What did they think they were going to throw away? Sometimes that’s what’s most interesting.”
