In 2008, he was the first to discover the presence of lead in the ink used in the Herculaneum texts. Dating to the 3rd or 4th century CE, it was found to contain texts from the Biblical book of Leviticus. In 2015, he used X-ray tomography and computer vision to “unwrap” and help scholars read the badly charred En-Gedi scroll that was found in the Dead Sea region of Israel. For over 20 years, he’s been developing technologies to restore and read ancient historical and cultural artefacts that have been damaged with time. Seales is a pioneer of virtual unwrapping. The Vesuvius Challenge, as it is called, was launched in March 2023, by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, entrepreneur Daniel Gross, and Brent Seales, a computer science professor at the University of Kentucky. There are prizes up for grabs worth a total of $1million. It invites machine-learning and computer-vision experts to participate in a race to virtually unwrap two scrolls and four fragments. If the remaining scrolls can be “read”, “we can sort of reach back and pull something up from that period that we otherwise don’t have,” Janko says.
There were fragments of comedies in Latin, so there were literary papyri as well as philosophical ones.”
There was a speech by Seneca the Elder, of which we didn’t have anything before. “The library also contains some books from contemporary life, a few books in Latin, some of poetry. A lot of the books are by Philodemus himself, including drafts in the author’s own handwriting,” says Richard Janko, a professor of classical studies at the University of Michigan who has been studying these scrolls since 1985.
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“Philodemus was collecting a whole series of books, most relating to the Epicurean school of thought, many written by Epicurus (the 3rd century BCE Greek philosopher). The texts likely belonged to the philosopher and the senator, who are believed to have been friends, with the philosopher also acting as the senator’s guide. (It might interest history buffs to know that Caesoninus’s daughter was Calpurnia, wife of the Roman emperor Julius Caesar, who lived from 100 BCE to 44 BCE.) The details that did emerge from some of the attempts to read them suggest that the texts were found in the personal library of the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus (110 BCE to 30 BCE), at the Villa dei Papyri, a sprawling mansion owned by the Roman senator Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus (101 BCE -43 BCE), about a century before the eruption. Today, over 250 of the intact carbonised scrolls remain to be studied. Between these various attempts, some details emerged, but the cost was too high to continue. In the late 18th century, an Italian monk spent decades unravelling more than 200 scrolls, using a machine he devised that could slowly unroll them, by 1 cm a day, using small weights attached to strings.Īs late as the 1980s, researchers were using a chemical solvent in attempts to make the writing more legible, but to do this they had to first pick each scroll apart. Researchers dissected some, chipped away at others, dipped a few in water, only to see them break down. Hundreds have been destroyed amid attempts to unfurl and read them. The scrolls and fragments were found in an underground library. The ruins of the Roman city of Herculaneum, near present-day Naples. Some scrolls are charred but retain their original structure others survive as burned fragments. They lay there undisturbed for over 1,700 years, and were found accidentally in 1752, by well-diggers. The heat from the eruption sealed the papyri into the ruins of what is believed to have been the mansion of a Roman senator. The scrolls were both burned and preserved when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE. It is the only library to have survived fundamentally intact from Antiquity (the period between the 8th century BCE and 5th centuries CE, considered particularly culturally significant because it marked the rise of direct democracies, complex Western philosophy, theatre, poetry and writing, around the Mediterranean). This was originally a set of over 1,000 burned scrolls and fragments found in an underground library in the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum (near present-day Naples).
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