The title and author of a charred scroll recovered from Herculaneum have been identified by researchers.
The ancient Roman town of Herculaneum was encased in volcanic ash following the 79 CE eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Remaining there is a massive library, known as the Villa of the Papyri, belonging to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus. The 1,785 papyrus scrolls from the library are thought to contain significant philosophical and literary texts by preeminent ancient Greek and Roman scholars.
Research on scrolls there is ongoing and is being fostered by an international competition known as the Vesuvius Challenge, which awards monetary prizes to those who can help decipher the scrolls using AI technology, as the charred scrolls cannot be unfurled.
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The contents of this scroll have been unknown for the last 2,000 years. Now, the scroll is thought to be part of an influential multivolume work, titled On Vices, by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus from the 1st century CE.
Researchers were able to identify this information after X-raying the carbonized papyrus and creating a three-dimensional reconstruction that was analyzed using AI. They then assessed visible traces of ink lettering from the X-ray images. This scroll is one of three from Herculaneum housed in the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford University.
“It’s the first scroll where the ink could just be seen on the scan,” Michael McOsker, a papyrologist at University College London who is collaborating with researchers to read the text, told the Guardian. “Nobody knew what it was about. We didn’t even know if it had writing on.”
The scroll was scanned at Diamond, the United Kingdom’s national synchrotron facility in Oxfordshire, last July. Earlier this year, some words from the scroll were discovered.
Further work conducted by Sean Johnson at the Vesuvius Challenge, as well as by Marcel Roth and Micha Nowak at the University of Würzburg, located the title and author of the text in the innermost section of the scroll for which they received the challenge’s $60,000 (£45,200) first title prize.
A book number on the scroll suggests that it could be the first installment of more works. On Vices is known to contain at least 10 volumes across such topics as arrogance, flattery, greed, and home management.
Eighteen additional scrolls were scanned at Diamond in March. This week, 20 more are expected to be imaged at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble.
“All of the technological progress that’s been made on this has been in the last three to five years and on the timescales of classicists, that’s unbelievable,” McOsker added.