A 21-year-old University of Nebraska-Lincoln student has used AI to decipher ancient Greek letters inside a sealed scroll from Herculaneum, Italy, according to a report in Nature. The breakthrough offers hope for reading hundreds more scrolls buried during the 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

Luke Farritor developed a machine learning algorithm that detected subtle texture differences between inked and blank areas of the rolled papyrus. His neural network highlighted over 10 Greek characters, including “porphyras” meaning purple, winning him the $40,000 “first letters” prize in the Vesuvius Challenge contest.

The contest was organized by researchers seeking to read the fragile, unopened scrolls found in Herculaneum, the only intact library surviving from ancient Greco-Roman times. Attempts to physically open the scrolls have yielded only fragments. Most of the 600+ scrolls, held in the National Library of Naples, remain unreadable.

In 2016, Brent Seales of the University of Kentucky used X-ray scanning to virtually unwrap and read a burnt scroll from Israel. But the ink on the older Herculaneum scrolls lacks metal and is invisible in scans. Seales realized texture differences caught by CT scans could indicate inked areas. He trained an AI on opened fragments to prove this, then scanned intact scrolls at high resolution.

The public Vesuvius Challenge

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Author: Decrypt AI, Edited by Stacy Elliot

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