Secrets of ancient Herculaneum scroll deciphered by AI

ROME — Buried in ash after Mount Vesuvius’ cataclysmic eruption in 79 A.D., hundreds of papyrus scrolls have kept their secrets hidden for centuries. But archeologists have now been able to decipher some of the ancient text with the help of artificial intelligence.

Discovered in the ruins of a villa thought to have been owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, the Herculaneum papyri are a collection of around 1,000 scrolls that were carbonized during the eruption, along with thousands of other relics.

Found by a farmworker in the 18th century, they are named after the place where they were buried, Herculaneum — an ancient Roman town to the south of Pompeiithat was also destroyed by the blast.

Previous attempts to unlock their secrets have failed because most of the scrolls were turned into carbonized ash and broke into pieces. However, a number of them were painstakingly unrolled by a monk over several decades and found to contain philosophical texts written in Greek.

“Until now, the only way we have had to read what’s inside the Herculaneum scrolls is to put together the thousands of pieces of the ones that crumbled apart,” Richard Janko, a distinguished professor of classical studies at the University of Michigan, told NBC News on Thursday.

“It’s like putting together a mosaic, and there’s not many people willing to do it,” he added. “So it may take 500 years to decipher their content. With this technique, hopefully, it should be much easier, and quicker.”

The breakthrough came after a global competition was launched to accelerate the reading of the texts. The Vesuvius Challenge offered $1 million in prizes to anyone who could solve the problem and find a way to read the remaining 270