Vesuvius Challenge: Title of a charred papyrus scroll deciphered

The Papyri of Herculaneum are a collection of ancient writings that were preserved under ash and mud in the Roman city of Herculaneum during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. The scrolls are extremely fragile – Previous attempts to unroll them often destroyed them. Now, for the first time, researchers have succeeded in identifying the title and author of the papyrus scroll PHerc. 172 without unrolling it. This was reported in the journal Nature, among others.

Marcel Roth from the University of Würzburg and Michael Nowak from Gray Swan AI analyzed a scroll using computer tomography and AI-supported image recognition. They have now won the Vesuvius Challenge prize of 60,000 US dollars for their work. This was launched in 2023 to gain insights from the past. Anyone around the world can take part in making the writings legible.

The first step was to manually annotate which parts were papyrus and which were ink. In order to recognize the script, the medical transformer model "UNETR" was adapted to enable fast iterations on computers in which, among other things, a powerful graphics card is installed.

About the vices

The scroll is entitled "On the Vices" and comes from Philodemus, a Greek philosopher of Epicureanism, whose teachings emphasize the search for joy and happiness as central to a good life. The scroll is probably part of a larger work that could possibly be called "On the vices and the opposite virtues and in whom they are and what they are about".

The team had previously used these methods to identify individual words in other scrolls – but the decipherment of the title and author is new. As part of the Vesuvius Challenge, writings have been deciphered repeatedly in recent years. The first charred papyrus scroll from Herculaneum was made partially legible as part of the Vesuvius Challenge in 2023. In 2024, researchers succeeded in deciphering 1000 words from a Herculaneum scroll.

(mack)