By Sara Bright
In a breakthrough merging artificial intelligence with classical scholarship, researchers have decoded the word “διατροπή” (disgust) from a 2,000-year-old scroll carbonised by Mount Vesuvius’ catastrophic eruption in AD 79. This marks the first legible text extracted from Herculaneum scroll PHerc.172, one of antiquity’s most enigmatic artefacts, now housed at Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries. The discovery forms part of the Vesuvius Challenge, a global competition harnessing machine learning to resurrect the lost libraries of the Roman elite.
Decoding Disgust in Antiquity
The term διατροπή – repeated twice within the scroll’s opening columns – offers tantalising clues about the text’s philosophical bent. Unlike the Epicurean tracts dominating Herculaneum’s surviving library, this scroll may critique hedonism or moral decay. Dr. Richard Janko, a leading papyrologist, suggests the context could mirror Seneca’s later writings on ethical corruption: “Disgust often signals cultural critique in Hellenistic texts.” The Bodleian team speculates the scroll belongs to Philodemus of Gadara, an Epicurean philosopher whose works on rhetoric and music were previously found in the villa’s ruins.
AI’s Dance with Carbonised Papyri
Traditional methods risk destroying these fragile scrolls – hand-unfurling reduces them to ash. Enter Dr. Brent Seales, a computer scientist whose team developed non-invasive X-ray tomography and machine-learning algorithms to virtually “unroll” the layers. The ink’s chemical signature – potentially lead-based – allowed AI to distinguish text from charred papyrus. “We’re not decoding,” Seales clarifies, “but amplifying ink visibility for human scholars.” The process, refined through the Vesuvius Challenge, has yielded 15% of PHerc.172’s text, with hopes to reach its core, where the title may lie.
The Vesuvius Challenge Unveiled
Launched in 2023, this $1m initiative crowdsources tech solutions to read Herculaneum’s 1,800 scrolls. PHerc.172’s legibility stems from its ink’s density, detectable even through carbonisation. Participants train AI on 3D scans, competing to extract characters. The Bodleian’s Dr. David Howell notes: “Each scroll is a Russian doll – text wrapped around a wooden spindle, compressed by pyroclastic heat.” Early successes have identified Greek letters with 85% accuracy, though full translations require philologists’ nuance.
Herculaneum’s Buried Library
The scrolls hail from the Villa dei Papiri, a luxury estate buried under 25 metres of volcanic material. Unlike Pompeii’s human casts, Herculaneum preserved ink: its ultra-rapid carbonisation “froze” papyri mid-combustion. The villa’s library, rediscovered in 1752, contains the only surviving texts from antiquity not copied by medieval scribes. Previous deciphered works include Epicurus’ theories on pleasure and an unknown history of Rome’s Senate.
Ethics of Digital Resurrection
Critics argue AI risks misinterpreting context – a concern countered by Oxford’s Dr. Dirk Obbink: “Machines map ink; humans interpret meaning.” The scroll’s disgust emerges not from algorithms but scholars cross-referencing Stoic and Epicurean lexicons. Yet challenges persist: Herculaneum’s scribes used scriptio continua (no spaces or punctuation), demanding grammatical intuition.
Future of Ancient Text Recovery
The next phase targets scrolls from the villa’s lower library, rumoured to hold Latin texts, including lost plays by Sophocles. Dr. Seales’ team is refining AI to handle ink variations – some scrolls use carbon-based inks invisible to X-rays. Parallel projects, like the Dead Sea Scrolls AI Initiative, adopt similar tech, suggesting a renaissance in textual archaeology.
A Bridge Across Millennia
As PHerc.172’s columns gradually unveil their secrets, they resurrect voices silenced by Vesuvius – a poignant reminder of knowledge’s fragility. For Bodley’s Librarian Richard Ovenden, this fusion of silicon and scholarship signals a paradigm shift: “We’re not just reading history; we’re recovering humanity’s collective memory.” In disgust, we find not just a word, but a key to dialogues that shaped Western thought – now whispering anew through the ashes.
