- Almost 2,000 years ago, Mount Vesuvius buried hundreds of papyrus scrolls in the city of Herculaneum.
- The scrolls can't be unrolled so the Vesuvius Challenge was launched to find alternative methods.
- A 21-year-old student used machine learning to find the first word in the scroll, winning $40,000.
Luke Farritor, a 21-year-old undergraduate student at the University of Nebraska, just won $40,000 for a breakthrough discovery in science.
Farritor was the first to read a word from one of the ancient Herculaneum scrolls as part of the Vesuvius Challenge — a competition with $1,000,000 in prizes for people who can unlock the secrets of these ancient scrolls using modern technology.
Why the Herculaneum scrolls can't be read like normal
When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, Pompeii wasn't the only town it obliterated. Mudslides and immense heat reached all the way to the prosperous city of Herculaneum, in what is now Itlay.
The heat was so intense, it instantaneously transformed hundreds of papyri scrolls into fossilized chunks of carbon. Those ancient scrolls then lay buried in mud for 1,700 years until they were finally excavated in 1752.
Any attempts to unfurl the Herculaneum scrolls, which now resemble charcoal logs, would damage them beyond repair.
"These are such crazy objects. They're all crumpled and crushed," Federica Nicolardi, a member of the academic committee that reviewed Farritor's findings, told Nature.
That's where modern-day technology comes in.
Instead, researchers have used X-rays and machine learning to read a word from one of the scrolls for the very first time.
As part of the Vesuvius Challenge, the University of Kentucky recruited citizen scientists to use AI to parse out words from the X-ray images of the still-rolled scrolls.
Farritor was the first to read a word from the scroll and was awarded $40,000 from the Vesuvius Challenge at a press conference announcing the finding on Thursday.
Purple cloth
To win the prize, Farritor needed to detect at least 10 legible letters on the scroll. Working on a region that was less than a square inch, Farritor's algorithm detected several letters, including a complete word.
Farritor was the first person to submit enough legible letters to win the prize.
"I saw these letters and I just completely freaked out," he said during the press conference. "I freaked out, almost fell over, almost cried."
Federica Niccolardi, a professor of classics at the University of Naples Federico II, read the ancient Greek word, "πορφυρας" which means either "purple dye" or "cloths of purple."
While she noted that there isn't enough context to understand what the scroll is saying, she said she's confident scholars will soon be able to read more of the document. "I think this will be a great revolution" in the field of papyrology.
She noted that these are unknown texts, making their unraveling of great interest to literary scholars as well.
When they do get the full picture of what the scroll contains, Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, expects it to contain familiar themes.
"What I expect is writing that expresses what it means to be human, speaking of love and of war and of the things that still matter to us because we are human, just like they were human."
The future of unwrapped scrolls
With so many of the scrolls unread, there's still a grand prize, worth $700,000, on the line. To win, a team will have to read four passages from the two scanned scrolls.
Seales said it's not just ancient texts that could benefit from the techniques the university is using.
He noted that the Frankin papers, damaged documents that were part of an expedition to the Arctic, are a candidate.
"It's unclear what's written on those papers," he said. Virtual unwrapping might be the thing that could reveal it."