We're finally reading the secrets of Herculaneum's lost library A whole library's worth of papyri owned by Julius Caesar's father-in-law were turned to charcoal by the eruption of Vesuvius. Deep within a particle accelerator, theoretical physicist Giorgio Angelotti is hard at work. He sets a black cylinder on a mount, bolts it down, then runs through some safety checks before retreating from the chamber, known as "the hatch". "You have to be sure there's no one in the hatch before you close the door," he says. That's because he is about to blast the sample with a super-powerful beam of X-rays.

Few objects pique the curiosity of academics quite like the Herculaneum scrolls – the ancient documents buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. These priceless rolled-up documents carry ancient text written in carbon-based ink on papyrus – a material similar to paper made from the pith of the papyrus plant. Now, for the first time, researchers have found the title and author inside one of the scrolls known as PHerc. With the help of AI, it has been identified as'On Vices' by the Greek philosopher Philodemus, a historic ethical treatise providing guidance for'cultivating a virtuous life'. In recognition of this achievement, researchers have been awarded the Vesuvius Challenge First Title Prize, which includes prize money of 60,000/ 45,000.

A closed carbonised papyrus scroll from Herculaneum being scanned. The Vesuvius Challenge is an unparalleled competition in the field of classical studies, with the potential to pave the way for something akin to a second Renaissance. Its objective is to use artificial intelligence (AI) to virtually unroll hundreds of closed papyrus scrolls, containing ancient literature that has not been seen for 2,000 years. When Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD79, it buried various cities at the Gulf of Naples under massive volcanic material – including Herculaneum, located near Pompeii. In the 18th century, an exceptionally luxurious Roman villa was excavated there, close to the ancient city walls and shoreline. The villa's marvellous wall paintings, mosaics, busts and statues had been conserved by the ashes.

Ancient rock carvings have been uncovered near the Amazon River amid drought conditions in Brazil. A set of ancient texts burned by the volcanic eruption on Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. have been deciphered thanks to a team of researchers using AI. The nearly 2,000-year-old texts were unreadable after being charred in a villa in Herculaneum, a Roman town near Pompeii. The texts were discovered in an ancient villa in the town of Herculaneum. Believed to have been owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, the texts were carbonized by the heat of the volcanic debris.

Artificial intelligence has helped decipher an ancient papyrus scroll, which was transformed into a lump of blackened carbon by volcanic ash from Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. The first passages of readable text reveal never-before-seen musings from a Greek philosopher. The discovery nabbed the 700,000 grand prize in the Vesuvius Challenge, and used a combination of 3D mapping and AI techniques to detect ink and decipher letter shapes within segments of scrolls known as the Herculaneum papyri, which had been digitally scanned. The combined efforts of the winning team members – Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor and Julian Schilliger – could pave the way for more discoveries from additional papyrus scrolls that were once housed in a library in the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum. "I think it's going to be a huge boon to our knowledge of ancient philosophy, just gigantic – a staggering amount of new text," says Michael McOsker at the University College London, who was not involved in the discovery.

A Roman scroll, partially preserved when it was buried in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, has been virtually unwrapped and decoded using artificial intelligence. The feat was achieved by three contestants in the Vesuvius Challenge, a competition launched in March 2023 in which people around the world raced to read the ancient Herculaneum papyri. Papyrologists working with the Vesuvius Challenge believe the scroll contains "never-before-seen text from antiquity," and the text in question is a piece of Epicurean philosophy on the subject of pleasure. The winning submission shows ancient Greek letters on a large patch of scroll, and the author seems to be discussing the question: are things that are scarce more pleasurable as a result? The author, whose identity is unconfirmed, doesn't think so: "As too in the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant," one passage from the scroll reads.

On a Saturday night in late August, Luke Farritor, a 21-year old computer science student at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, was on his way home from a party at a friend's house in Omaha when he saw something on his phone that he says almost caused him to break into tears and fall to the floor. Farritor had spent the last six months poring over 3D X-rays of ancient scrolls, often for more than 40 hours per week, all alongside internships and his studies. While he was at the party he had received a message informing him that new segments of scanned and virtually flattened scrolls had just been uploaded. With the music blaring around him, he logged onto his PC remotely to set the AI model that he'd built to detect ink from previous scroll scans to work on the new segments and rejoined the party. After driving home, on the walk back to his college dorm from the parking lot, Farritor remembered the scrolls and checked his phone.

The Greek word for "purple" has been extracted from a Herculaneum scroll Almost 2000 years after they were buried by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, scrolls from a library in the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum have begun to reveal their secrets. The tightly wrapped papyrus scrolls were charred in the disaster, which also destroyed the nearby town of Pompeii. But by studying 3D X-ray scans of the scrolls, researchers have deciphered a word on one of them: "porphyras", meaning "purple". The breakthrough came from Luke Farritor, a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His success involved training an AI to identify nearly invisible ink-like patterns in the 3D scans. "Seeing Luke's first word was a shock," says Michael McOsker at the University College London in the UK, who was not involved in the discovery.