The First Word Decoded From A Manuscript Nearly Destroyed By Mt. Vesuvius

At this point, few people wouldn't recognize the names "Pompeii" and "Mt. Vesuvius." Back in 79 C.E., Vesuvius erupted and annihilated the surrounding countryside. The volcano spewed sulfuric gas into the air, rained down white-hot ash and pumice, and swallowed the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum in pyroclastic flow so hot that fluid in victims' bodies evaporated and one man's brain turned to glass. Anywhere from 2,000 to 16,000 of their 20,000 residents died in mere hours. 

If not for the clever work of Naples-born Giuseppe Fiorelli, the memory of Mt. Vesuvius might be far dimmer than it is. He's the one who came up with the idea of pouring plaster into the human-shaped holes left behind by bodies embedded in Vesuvius' hardened lava around Pompeii and Herculaneum. And now thanks to some new, very different technological breakthroughs, we can learn more about the towns than ever before. Enter the Vesuvius Challenge, which invites intrepid members of the public to use AI to do what no one's been able to do before: Read charred and carbonized papyrus scrolls discovered at Herculaneum.

Even though Fiorelli began excavation in Pompeii in 1860, over 1,800 Herculaneum scrolls were discovered at the site before then in 1752. The scrolls couldn't, and can't, be unrolled without destroying them. They've sat unread not only since they were discovered, but since Vesuvius erupted nearly 2,000 years ago. But now, after 20 years of computer science work, we can virtually unroll the scrolls and try to read them. And one of the first words to pop up might not be what you'd expect: "disgust." 

Looking at the charred papyrus scrolls found at Herculaneum in 1752, you'd be forgiven for thinking they were logs of charcoal. But you can also see concentric rings of rolled-up papyrus by looking at each scroll's short end. How could we possibly read the words inside? This was the question facing alumni professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky, Brent Seales, when he helped kick off the Vesuvius Challenge in 2023. The challenge's core idea is simple: Read the scrolls without destroying them, which means without unraveling them. In other words, converting rumpled-up, scanned 3D versions of the scrolls into flat, readable 2D versions.

To do that, the Vesuvius Challenge invites members of the public to use imaging technology and heavy-duty math to train AI for the task. There's even a web-based app, Neuroglancer, that you can use to examine the rolled-up 3D version of a scroll. But as the website says, "Tracing the 3D sheets through these damaged scrolls is nearly impossible in the raw scan data. More structured representations ... simplify downstream tasks significantly." 

Speaking of those structured representations — and to demonstrate the difficulty of the task at hand — the challenge's unwrapping page describes a readable 2D version of a scroll as "an orientable genus-0 developable surface" that "allows you to construct a bidimensional isometric parametrization on the manifold, thereby defining a local basis." See? Totally doable. They've already given about $1.5 million in prizes to various people so far. 

Currently, the Vesuvius Challenge has made its way to the fifth Herculaneum scroll, known internally by its technical name of PHerc. 172. But because the folks undergoing the challenge can't read ancient Greek, interpretation of the scrolls falls to scholars. For that, we turn to the University of Oxford, which has three of the scrolls. As the university's Bodleian Libraries says, one peculiar word has come up twice early in translation: "διατροπή," or "disgust."  

Without context, there's absolutely zero way to know what the writer meant. Were they talking about a gross kebab they had at the corner thermopolium, aka, fast food joint? Was the writer lobbing an insult at a local politician, as in a sense of moral disgust? Were they complaining about his boss' underarm hygiene? We could say, "We'll never know," but that's not true. With further research by the contributors to the Vesuvius Challenge and further interpretation work by scholars, we'll know. It's only a matter of time.

That being said, we already have an interesting clue. The Herculaneum scrolls weren't just random scrolls found in a pile on the street. They were buried under 65 feet of ash and mud at the residence of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, the father-in-law of none other than Julius Caesar. And they weren't a mere collection of scraps, either — they were Caesoninus' entire private library. This means the scrolls could contain anything from literature to historiographic writing to legal documents to private letters to whatever else. The possibilities are limitless, which makes the findings of the Vesuvius Challenge all the more fascinating.