The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79 laid waste to Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum where the intense blast of hot gas carbonised hundreds of ancient scrolls in the library of an enormous luxury villa.
“We’ve shown how to read the ink of Herculaneum. That gives us the opportunity to reveal 50, 70, maybe 80% of the entire collection,” said Seales. “We’ve built the boat. Now we want everybody to get on and sail it with us.”, Seales’s team is releasing its software and thousands of 3D X-ray images of two rolled-up scrolls and three papyrus fragments.
Teams that enter will compete for a grand prize of $150,000, awarded to the first to read four passages of text from the inner layers of the scrolls before the end of 2023. Progress prizes include $50,000 for accurately detecting ink on the papyri from the 3D X-ray scans. While the black ink used to write the scrolls cannot be seen on the charred papyri, infrared images of surface fragments have revealed Greek letters and symbols. Armed with these and X-ray images of the same fragments, Seales’s team trained their algorithm to read the lettering from X-ray images alone. Once trained, the algorithm could then spot new text in hidden layers of the tightly wrapped scrolls.“A human cannot pick this out with their eye,” Seales said.