Ancient Scrolls Are About to Become Readable

Сегодня существует огромное количество древних книг и свитков, которые нельзя открыть — если это сделать, они превратятся в прах. Но учёные всё равно научились их читать, используя рентгеновские технологии и искусственный интеллект.

Одним из самых значимых источников этой древней информации является библиотека, найдённая в вилле за пределами Геркуланума.

В 79 году н.э. извержение горы Везувий погребило город под палящей лавиной пепла и газа при температурах около 500°C. Всё горело — но ничего не исчезало. Жара превратила папирусные свитки в комки угля, а затем вулканические породы запечатали руины на две тысячи лет. В то время как почти вся другая древняя литература, оставленная на открытом воздухе, разлагалась и была навсегда утеряна, эта библиотека молча ждала под землёй.

В 1750 году итальянский фермер, копая колодец, ударился о мраморный пол. Раскопки в вилле — предположительно принадлежавшей тестю Юлия Цезаря — выявили статуи, фрески и сотни обугленных свитков, которые сначала принимали за куски угля или сожжённые рыболовные сети.

Искушение прочитать их было огромным. Но каждая попытка физически развернуть хрупкий, сплавленный папирус заканчивалась одинаково — свиток рассыпался. Некоторые пытались разрезать их и соскребать слой за слоем, переписывая видимый текст, прежде чем стирать его, чтобы добраться до следующего слоя — хотя почерневшие чернила на почерневшем папирусе было почти невозможно различить. В итоге более шестисот свитков остались нетронутыми. Читать их означало уничтожить их.

Почему это важно

These aren't abstract archival papers. This is the only library from the ancient world to survive intact — not filtered through later copies and citations, but the real thing. Inside are the genuine voices of people who lived two thousand years ago: their thoughts on pleasure and happiness, debates on ethics and the nature of the gods, works by philosophers whose books were believed lost entirely.

It's a conversation with people who thought about the same things we do — just two thousand years earlier. And until recently, that conversation was physically out of reach.

Key milestones

2002 — Computer scientist Brent Seales at the University of Kentucky develops a method for "virtual unwrapping": scan a scroll on a tomography scanner, much like a medical CT, build a 3D model of its internal structure, then use computational methods to flatten it into a readable surface — without ever touching the papyrus itself.

2015 — The method works for the first time on the En-Gedi scroll (Israel), revealing a biblical text inside. But the Herculaneum scrolls posed a harder problem: their ink was carbon-based, nearly indistinguishable from the carbonized papyrus itself on an X-ray scan.

2019 — The US National Endowment for the Humanities awards Seales's team a $500,000 grant. That funding lets them train AI models not to "read letters," but to spot subtle changes in the papyrus's texture — where ink sits on top of the fibers, the surface responds to X-rays just slightly differently.

March 2023 — The Vesuvius Challenge launches: the data and software are released publicly, open to anyone who wants to try their hand at decoding. The first fragment of text found by a participant is the Greek word "πορφύρας" — "purple." A modest start to something that changed everything: it became clear that reading the sealed scrolls was no longer a question of "if," but "when."

February 2024 — Three students — Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor, and Julian Schilliger — win the $700,000 grand prize for decoding 15 columns of text from the scroll PHerc.Paris.4. The text turned out to be a philosophical discussion of pleasure and perception — likely a previously unknown work by Philodemus of Gadara.

2026 — The scroll PHerc. 1667 becomes the first Herculaneum scroll ever read in full, start to finish, without a single physical touch. Nearly 1.5 meters of continuous text across 20 columns. Inside: a philosophical treatise on ethics, art, and human nature — apparently Stoic, which came as a surprise, since the library was assumed to be mostly Epicurean. At the same time, researchers made out a title on a separate scroll: On Gods, Book 8, a work by Philodemus whose existence was previously unknown.

What's next

Only one scroll out of hundreds has been read in full so far. But it proved the method works not just on isolated words, but on complete texts — meaning it can scale to the entire collection. Researchers estimate the library may contain around 250 individual works still waiting to be recovered.

Brent Seales himself compares the moment to finally setting down an enormous weight — and now being able to build something new on that ground. If the whole library can eventually be read, it would be the largest influx of "new" ancient texts since the Renaissance. And if more scrolls are found beneath the still-unexcavated part of the villa, it could turn out to be the single largest such discovery in history.