Ancient scrolls near Pompeii were preserved but unreadable – are they now revealing their secrets?

Ancient scrolls charred by a volcanic eruption 2,000 years ago may finally be starting to reveal their secrets.

UK scientists say they have made a historic breakthrough in their efforts to decipher the artefacts – with the assistance of AI.

Hundreds of papyrus scrolls were found in the 1750s in the remains of a lavish villa at the Roman town of Herculaneum, which along with nearby Pompeii was destroyed when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79AD.

While the heat and ash from the volcano was catastrophic for the town, it preserved the scrolls – though in an unreadable state.

Scholars and scientists have been working for more than 250 years on ways to decipher the scrolls, which are too fragile to be unrolled physically.

In 2023, several tech executives sponsored the “Vesuvius Challenge” competition, offering cash prizes for efforts to decipher the scrolls with technology.

On Wednesday, the challenge announced a “historic breakthrough,” saying researchers had managed to generate the first image of the inside of one of the three scrolls held at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library.

University of Kentucky computer scientist Brent Seales, co-founder of the challenge, said the organisers were “thrilled with the successful imaging of this scroll”, saying it “contains more recoverable text than we have ever seen in a scanned Herculaneum scroll”.

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The scroll was scanned by Diamond Light Source, a lab in Harwell, near Oxford, by using a particle accelerator known as a synchrotron to create an intensely powerful X-ray.

AI was then used to piece together the images, searching for ink that reveals where writing is located. A 3D image of the scroll can then be formulated that allows experts to unroll it virtually.

Little of the text has been deciphered so far. One of the few words that has been made out is the ancient Greek for “disgust”.

Peter Toth, a curator at the Bodleian Library, said: “We need better images, and they are very positive and very, very confident that they can still improve the image quality and the legibility of the text.

“And then don’t forget that there is like 1,000 more scrolls in Naples.”