From ashes to AI, burned ancient scroll restored - 4th March 2024

Restoring part of an ancient scroll using AI (artificial intelligence) has landed a team of three students a $700,000 prize. The secrets that lay within the rolls of papyrus had previously been impossible to unravel, having been burnt to a crisp during a volcanic eruption.

Youssef Nader, an Egyptian PhD candidate, SpaceX intern Luke Farritor from the US, and Julian Schilliger, a robotics student from Switzerland, joined forces online, and succeeded in piecing together 5 percent of the scroll. Its contents, written in ancient Greek over 2000 years ago, were both lost and preserved by Mount Vesuvius erupting in 79 CE, encasing the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in ash and lava. The scroll was among 600 in a villa in Herculaneum caught in its wake. The first Vesuvius Challenge launched with a prize fund totalling $1 million promised to those able to uncover the secrets burned into the scorched papyrus.

Amateur and professional papyrologists and computer programmers around the world set to creating 3D models of the scroll, utilising high-resolution CT scans of the charred scrolls made available by the organisers. Yet even this left them unable to detect the ink since the scans failed to capture details like pigmentation.

One participant’s noticing a faint crackling pattern on one 3D scroll segment led to the Eureka moment which revealed the ink. Contestants then trained AI programmes on the image to identify the crackles elsewhere, resulting in Farritor’s discovery of the word ‘porphyras’ or purple.

Following this, Nader, Schillinger and Farritor collaborated to eventually identify 2,000 characters, which Nader explained was down to the winners’ sheer determination, stating, “The adrenaline rush is what kept us going.”

The challenge organisers branded the scroll, whose contents turned out to be about pleasure, referencing music, food and drink, “a 2,000 year old blog post about how to enjoy life.”

The challenge’s ambitions stretch much further, announcing a second challenge to read 90 percent of four scanned scrolls.

Antiquity expert Robert Fowler emphasised the significance of the challenge stating that “Some of these texts could completely rewrite the history of key periods of the ancient world.”