In the year 79 CE, Mount Vesuvius in Italy erupted, destroying and burying the
Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum in a violent inferno of fire, ash and rock.
This was obviously bad news for the thousands of people who died that day,
but strangely enough, it may have helped to preserve a library of scrolls
containing ancient knowledge otherwise lost to time.
See, although those scrolls were burned to a crisp in the conflagration, for the first
time, scientists have used X-ray scans and machine learning to begin to read them.
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Almost everything we know about the ancient Greek and Roman world
comes from only a tiny fraction of their written literature.
Books and scrolls are fragile, and stuff just gets lost.
But in 1750 CE, a farmer found what turned out to be a buried library
with thousands of scrolls, in a villa near Herculaneum.
The villa belonged to an important Roman statesman, possibly even a relation of
Julius Caesar, who liked to show off their wealth and taste with big collections.
The more things change.
The scrolls may contain works no modern person has ever seen,
which would hugely expand our knowledge of the classical world.
But they were all, y know, destroyed by a volcano.
So, end of story, right?
Well, it turns out that the eruption may have helped to preserve the scrolls,
in an odd, roundabout, haphazard sort of way.
See, rather than being reduced to ash,
these scrolls were buried, blackened, and only mostly destroyed.
And mostly destroyed is still slightly intact!
They were just waiting for someone to work out how to read them!
Then, in 2015, scientists trying to decipher a similarly-charred ancient document
came up with a way to scan burned parchments without actually touching them.
I mean, we cannot stress enough how brittle these things are.
People have tried to unroll the Herculaneum scrolls
and it went exactly as you'd think it would.
The idea was to use X-rays, since the beams pass through most materials,
and different materials show up differently in the resulting images.
In particular, it was a kind of scan called a CT scan.
That's the same medical imaging trick that lets doctors build up
a detailed, 3D, layer-by-layer picture of something inside your body.
Likewise, the researchers made complete 3D scans
of the scrunched-up parchment.
From that, they could use clever computer algorithms to work out
how the pages were crumpled up in the 3D bulk,
allowing them to digitally unfold the parchment and read the original text,
which turned out to contain passages from the Hebrew Bible.
The same trick should have worked with the Herculaneum scrolls,
but here, there was a problem: both their ink and their writing surface
are made of carbon, which all look the same to X-rays.
So in 2023, a group, which included one of the Bible parchment scientists,
launched a cash prize called the Vesuvius Challenge, to get volunteer scientists
to help decipher scans they created of the Herculaneum scrolls.
The competition organizers carefully designed the rules to ensure success,
like by splitting the contest into multiple smaller goals, each with smaller prizes.
Contestants could only claim prizes by sharing their methods openly,
so others could then take their ideas and leapfrog past them to bigger prizes.
Part cooperation, part competition!
Then, the organizers actually hired some of the most dedicated contributors
to work on parts of the project in parallel with the contestants, to spur people on.
See, the problem of ink detection here is fiendishly complex.
At first glance, the unwrapped CT-scans of the scrolls look totally text-less,
but the writing is actually hiding in plain sight. The smoking gun is the ‘crackle’
of certain parts of the scroll - tiny cracks caused by ink residue.
But this can be hard to tell apart from other kinds of cracks
and marks due to damage.
It's a bit like making a rubbing of a notepad to see what was written
on the page above, but, like, with the difficulty set to extreme.
The big breakthrough was using artificial intelligence to scan images of the scrolls.
Most of the attempts to unroll the scrolls in the last few centuries
have served to destroy them, but in some instances ink can be read off of them,
including via infrared scans.
This meant that there was a database of scroll images
that had been successfully read.
Just what you need to train a machine learning model
to identify more text from images.
So the contestants each designed algorithms to scan images in tiny chunks,
compare details to known ink sources, and then spot ink in uncategorized images
from scrolls that have been scanned and digitally unwrapped.
Of course, AI on its own can be unreliable, so the organizers were careful to
proof-read the code and verify the work using human eyes whenever possible.
Also, the algorithm could only recognize millimeter-sized bits of scroll textures,
not whole letters, so it couldn’t ‘hallucinate' fake letters
like some image-processing AIs are infamous for doing.
The hard work eventually paid off.
In late 2023, several people won the first major prize
for successfully deciphering one of the words from the scroll.
Which was the Greek word for “purple,” in case you were wondering.
Soon after, three people who'd won prizes earlier in the competition teamed up,
and combined their expertise to win the first Grand Prize of $700,000,
for deciphering a whole section of text.
The really cool thing is that they weren't archaeologists by training.
They were computer scientists, many of them students,
handing archaeology a huge gift.
In fact, the competition is still ongoing: the winners shared their methods online
and there's still chances to win further prizes.
The passage that’s been deciphered so far
is actually Greek philosophical musings on the nature of pleasure.
That might sound like first century People magazine,
but it's actually Epicurean philosophy - an intellectual movement that was
taken seriously in its time and that historians would love to recover more of.
And look, we could talk all day about the amazing historical implications
of just this initial discovery, but this is all just a warm-up.
The hardest physics and computer science parts are hopefully over,
but if the scrolls can be scanned at scale,
historians could have a mountain of new discoveries to make.
In fact, some archaeologists think we haven't even recovered all the scrolls yet.
There might be more that remain buried in the southern Italian countryside.
And after thousands of years, with the power of modern science,
we may finally be ready to unlock their secrets
and change our knowledge of the classical world forever.
Meanwhile, our patrons are changing our knowledge of the right-now world
by helping us make these videos for everybody.
You guys are super cool, so thanks.
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