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This month, a trio of computer scientists won the Vesuvius Challenge. The competition uses artificial intelligence to uncover his four texts from ancient Greece, where he was trapped for 2,000 years inside a charred scroll. The artifact was discovered in the Roman resort city of Herculaneum, which was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.
Richard Janko, a classics professor at the University of Michigan and one of the contest’s judges, told The Daily Beast that something like this “happens every half century.” Federica Nicolaardi, a papyrus scholar at Italy’s University of Naples Federico II and a fellow judge, told The Daily Beast that the discovery “could be a huge revolution.”
This technique could potentially allow archaeologists to “see” inside ancient documents that have been burnt, soaked, and sealed. This includes works of classical antiquity, hidden documents wrapped in Egyptian mummies, books burned during World War II, and discoveries in the Dead Sea that could shed new light on the early history of Christianity. Contains thousands of unique document fragments.
Perfectly preserved by a volcanic eruption, the town is a kind of in-between space where destruction and preservation go hand in hand, Nicolaardi said. Archaeologists have spent centuries excavating parts of Herculaneum, including the Villa dei Papiri, from which they have recovered approximately 1,800 cataloged fragments or entire scrolls.
The Herculaneum scroll with the red laser line being scanned by Brent Shields and his team at the French Institute.
edu lab
However, scrolls are extremely fragile. After all, they are burnt and charred and ancient. As a result, hundreds of pieces were ruined when people tried to spread them manually or by using machines. This leaves only a few hundred potentially readable.
This is the origin behind the competition. If a team can digitally crack one of them, solving the others digitally will be easy by comparison.
The contest, sponsored by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Y Combinator partner Daniel Gross, is open to individuals or teams who can generate at least four columns of readable digital text from a scan of the Herculaneum Scrolls by the end of the year. We offered a grand prize of $1 million. 2023. The winning team, made up of AI engineers Yusef Nader, Julian Schillinger, and Luke Faritor, recovered 15 columns of text from the papyrus, revealing an ancient Greek text laid out like a newspaper. did.
The process they used was originally developed by Brent Shields, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky who spent 20 years using technology to digitally analyze and reconstruct ancient texts. I’m here. The tool, called Volume Cartographer, uses AI to digitally unravel the layers of his single burnt papyrus scroll, which the SEAL team 3D-scanned.
But the challenge is far from over. In the team’s winning work, only his 5% of one scroll is exposed. In 2024, Friedman, Gross, and Shields are running a new contest where you can unroll the entire scroll to win a $100,000 prize. Eventually, they hope to digitally unpack all of the surviving intact Herculaneum scrolls.
If that can be achieved, the library could reveal new information about some of history’s most famous figures, such as Aristotle and Archimedes. Janko added that the text revealed in the contest could have been written by Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher and teacher of the famous Roman poet Virgil.
But first we need to further segment the scroll. Segmentation is the technical term for unraveling the digital layers of papyrus. Then there’s the problem of translating what you find, which can be a daunting task, but one that could be made easier with the help of AI. “Reading papyrus is not just a matter of recognizing the letters,” Nicolaardi says. “Rather, it’s important to understand the text.”
Rise of the AI archaeologist
The use of computers and scanning technology in archeology is not new. It was in 1896 that a mummy was first analyzed using X-rays. Such techniques have been used to uncover archaeological discoveries for more than a century since then. But before the SEALs’ digital decoding tools, Janko estimates that it would have taken at least 500 years to examine the Herculaneum scrolls.
SEALs used synchrotron scanning to solve the problem of unrolling fragile scrolls. This requires shining a powerful particle accelerator laser on the scroll, creating a high-fidelity her x-ray that shows all the layers of the scroll. From there, each layer needs to be selected and segmented. The inner layer is the most likely to peel off, Shields said.
“It’s very gratifying to see the youthful brain trust of people who really understand AI getting excited about something classic,” Shields said.
Although this protocol has so far only been used on these scrolls, it has wide-ranging archaeological applications. For example, Shields has used the technology to digitally decipher parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls and a copy of the book of Leviticus, dating from the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, recovered from a burnt-out synagogue in En Gedi, Israel. did.
He also plans to scan and decipher the still-sealed Egyptian papyrus scrolls in the Smithsonian’s collection. The artifact, bandaged in linen and sealed in wax with the symbol of Amenhotep his III, dates from around 1400 BC and has never been opened.
Shields will also look at the contents of a burnt medieval book recovered from the remains of Chartres, a French town near Paris that was largely destroyed in a 1944 Allied bombing campaign during World War II. This technique was also used for this purpose.
Janko said another potential treasure trove could be lurking in the depths of the Black Sea. There are at least 67 ancient shipwrecks on the ocean floor, and at depths below about 140 meters, there is no oxygen in the water, so they did not rot and their cargo did not freeze. Among the potential treasure troves are chests containing books and scrolls that may hold even more ancient historical secrets. Thanks to advances in this technology, it may now be possible to remove these papyri and see inside, Janko said.
It’s not just the classics where discoveries can be revived. Shields said the technology could also be applied to old film reels and negatives that have corroded and can no longer be developed or read using traditional methods.
But for now, researchers are still working to confidently translate the 15 columns they’ve created so far. This is a process that even the most arrogant Silicon Valley evangelist can’t speed up, Nicolaardi explained. “I think there are moments in this kind of quick work, but I also think there are moments where you have to stop and think a little bit, think about it and reflect,” she said. She claims much the same about the scroll itself. Nicolaardi points out that her last sentence roughly translates to “May the truth always be revealed to us.”
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