The interior of the Herculaneum roll seen for the first time from 79 AD

The image of the virtually unrolled roll shows a considerable part of the papyrus and some text columns, with about the last 26 lines of each column. While scholars of the University of Oxford are trying to interpret the text, the Vesuvius Challenge invites other scholars to come forward and join the collective effort to completely decipher the content.

One of the first words to be translated by ancient Greek is “disgust” and which appears twice in some text columns. Since the parchment was scanned at the Harwell Diamond Light Source in July 2024, at the United Kingdom Synchrone Scientific Structure, the Vesuvius team Challenge worked with artificial intelligence to put together the images and improve the clarity of the text. The researchers are further completing the image using a new segmentation approach in the hope of improving the consistency and clarity of the lines of text currently visible and perhaps to reach the end of the papyrus, the innermost part of the carbonized roll, where it could be preserved The Colophon with the title of the work.

Oxford’s roll, donated at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Ferdinand IV, king of Naples and Sicily, is unique among the materials of Herculaneum for the chemical composition of its ink, which appears more clearly in the X -ray scans. The researchers They believe that the ink can contain a more dense contaminant such as lead, but further tests will be needed to identify the exact recipe that has made the ink much more readable than other parchments that have been part of the Vesuvius Challenge.

The automatic learning used for this project focuses exclusively on the detection of the presence of ink, since the models have no understanding of language and cannot recognize the characters. Consequently, the next phase – the transcription and translation of the text – is entrusted to the experience of scholars and not to artificial intelligence.

Richard Openn, an official of the Bodleian library, said: “It is an incredible historical moment in which librarians, IT and scholars of the classic period collaborate to see the unpublished. The surprising steps forward made with imaging and artificial intelligence allow us to look within rolls that have not been read for almost 2,000 years.

The Vesuvius Challenge, the global initiative launched in 2023 to discover the content of the rolls of Herculaneum without any physical intervention on the rolls themselves, continues to encourage the contributions of researchers around the world.

Brent Seales, co -founder of Vesuvius Challenge and the main researcher of Educelab, said: “We are excited about the success of the animating of this parchment of the Bodleian Library and we are grateful to our partners for their support and collaboration. This parchment contains a quantity of recoverable text higher than that never seen in a parchment of Herculaneum subjected to scan. .

(by Paolo Martini)