First glance inside the burned scroll after 2000 years

Losko burned a scroll from the Roman city of Herculaneum is a digital “unsolved”, providing the first species inside 2000.

The document, which looks like a lump of charcoal, was charred by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD and is too fragile to be physically open physically.

But now scientists have used a combination of X -ray images and artificial intelligence to unfold it, revealing rows and columns of text.

It takes more work to make the scroll completely legible to decipher its content, but the team behind the project says the results are very promising.

“We are confident that we will be able to read almost the entire scroll in its entirety and for the first time we have really been able to say that with great confidence,” says Stephen Parsons, a leading project for Vesuvius Challenge, an international competition trying to unlock the Herculaneum scrolls S

Some letters are already clearly visible in the ancient text and the team believes it is a work of philosophy.

Hundreds of carbonized scrolls were found in the Herculaneum, which, like his neighboring Pompey, were buried under meters of volcanic ash.

In the past, some of the documents that were made of thick paper -like material called Papyrus were appreciated, but they fell into pieces.

The Bodlian Library of the University of Oxford owns several of the scrolls. Considering illegible, they have remained untouched for decades.

“We have never been convinced that any of the techniques would be safe enough or efficient enough to get information from the scrolls,” explained Nicole Gilroy, the leader of book conservation.

But the promise of a high -tech solution prompted the team to pull out one of the precious scrolls beyond storage.

It is placed in a specially made case and is taken to Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire.

Inside this huge machine called synchrotron, electrons accelerate to almost the speed of light to obtain a powerful X -ray that can probe the scroll without damaging it.

“He can see things a few thousand millimeters on the scale,” explained Adrian Mancuso, Director of Physical Sciences at Diamond.

Scanning is used to create a 3D reconstruction, after which the layers inside the scroll must be identified – it contains about 10 m papyrus.

“We need to understand which layer is different from the next layer so that we can unfold this digit,” said Dr. Mancuso.

Once this artificial intelligence is used to detect the ink. It is easier to say than to do – both papyrus and ink are made of carbon and are almost indistinguishable from each other.

Thus, AI hunts the smallest signals that the ink may be there, then this ink is painted digitally, with the letters in the light.

“We can say that the whole scroll is full of text,” said Stephen Parsons.

“Now we can work on showing more clearly. We will move from a handful of words to truly essential passages.”

Last year, a Vesuvius Challenge team managed to read about 5% from another Herculaneum scroll.

His theme was the Greek Epicurean philosophy, which teaches that performance can be found through the pleasure of everyday things.

Baudelai's scroll is probably the same subject – but Vesuvius's team calls for more human and computational ingenuity to see if this is the case.

For Nicole Gilroy, the work provides a connection to the past.

“I just love this connection with anyone who has collected them, who wrote them, who has rolled these turning and put them on the shelves. There is a real human aspect that I just think is really valuable,” she said.