Herculaneum

When Vesuvius almost 2,000 years ago erupted It devastated the cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabia, sowing the region with chaos and death. It also left us with a macabre ‘snapshot’ of what life was like in Roman villas in the 1st century AD, a photo preserved under layers of volcanic ash. Among them, centuries ago, archaeologists found the ‘Villa of the Papyri’a library located in Herculaneum with hundreds of ancient papyri. Any historian’s dream. The problem is that their scrolls were charred, reduced to blackened cylinders seemingly impossible to read. Apparently. Thanks to technology We have managed to read a complete one without having to unroll it. A trip to 79 AD We do not know exactly in what month Vesuvius erupted (we have always believed that it was in August, but recent studies suggest that it could have been in autumn or even winter). What we do know is that in 79 AD the Campania volcano unleashed chaos in the region, unleashing a rain of ash and lapilli that swept away neighboring Pompeii, Stabia and Herculaneum. When the archaeologists began to excavate among the remains of this last Roman villa, in the 18th centurythey got a surprise: they discovered papyri and more papyri. Around 1,800. The remains of an ancient library full of works by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus of Gadara and other authors, a priceless source of texts on ancient wisdom, poetry, prose… The problem is that a good part of this bibliographical treasure was illegible. The scrolls had stood the test of centuries, but the eruption of Vesuvius had reduced them to charred scrolls. “Extremely delicate”. As they explain From the Archaeological Park of Herculaneum itself, the Villa of the Papyri offers a unique, but frustrating treasure. Scholars have known for centuries that they have at their disposal papyri full of knowledge as valuable as it is inaccessible. Any attempt to unfold one of the scrolls carried the risk of turning it into ash. “The scrolls are extremely delicate. To avoid the risk of destroying them, the unrolling and deciphering process is very complex,” recognize from the park. They know what they are talking about. In the 19th century or even already well into the 20thin the 60s and 80s, there were experts who seriously damaged some papyri when manipulating them, ruining part of the documents. Fortunately, things have changed and what was impossible decades ago is no longer impossible today. “For almost two millennia, many of these texts have been physically preserved, but have remained intellectually inaccessible,” explains Brent Sealesfrom the University of Kentucky. “Today, after years of interdisciplinary work with advanced imaging techniques, AI, academic research and an innovation competition, we can finally read each other.” Vesuvius Challenge. In 2023, building on the work of Seales and researchers at the University of Kentucky with the machine learning and X-ray scanning, an international call was launched that challenged engineers, scientists and archaeologists around the world to find new ways to solve the mystery and decipher the Herculaneum scrolls once and for all without having to open (and destroy) them. The initiative was named ‘Vesuvius Challenge’ and was accompanied by the promise of juicy financial rewards. It worked. “A global community came together to solve the problem using computer vision, machine learning and a lot of work. Finally, after 275 years, we can begin to read the scrolls,” explains the organization, which at the beginning of 2024 was already celebrating the first progress of the initiative. Now, just three years later, they just presented what is probably his greatest achievement, a milestone unimaginable to experts in the 1960s. What have they achieved? Unroll and read the entire contents of a scroll known to experts as PHerc. 1667one of the pieces from the Villa of the Papyri preserved in Naples and which until now had been completely restored. What’s more, what we have today is only a damaged part of the original manuscript, a scroll about eight centimeters high and two centimeters wide. There are testimonies from the 18th century that they describe it as a relatively intact papyrus (beyond being burned), but attempts to decipher it since then caused it to split and lose its outer layers. Do it without doing it. What is really fascinating is that researchers have managed to reveal almost 1.5 meters of text distributed in 20 columns without the need to physically unfold the papyrus or deteriorate (even more) the roll. Unlike researchers in the 60s and 80s, they have used two great tools: digital scanning and AI. Thanks to them they have managed to read one of the scrolls from the Herculaneum library from beginning to end, a milestone which leaves two great news. First, we have been able to read a document that no one has looked at for almost 2,000 years. Second, we have a system that can help us continue advancing in the deciphering of other files. In fact, 70 columns of another text (PHerc. 172) preserved in Oxford have also been recovered and complete books of the philosopher Philodemus have been identified. “This scroll was considered illegible when it was partially opened in the 1980s. While some single letters could be made out, the overlapping layers hid the writing and the scroll was assigned a zero readability score. But now, thanks to virtual unrolling, we can follow coherent reasoning across multiple columns. This is a radical change,” celebrate Federica Nicolardi, professor of papyrology at the University of Naples. Surprise find. Efforts to decipher the PHerc scroll. 1667 have been worth it. And not only because of the historical milestone it represents. Its content has surprised experts. To start with its age. The calligraphy and internal references have led experts to think that it dates from the 2nd century BC or even the late 3rd century BC, which would make it “one of the oldest scrolls in the collection” discovered in Herculaneum, explains Nicolardi. Experts have also learned that the scroll contains a philosophical treatise on … Read more