SUBSCRIBE & SAVE Less than $3 per week View Profile The Explainer Talking Points The Week Recommends Newsletters From the Magazine The Week Junior Food & Drink Personal Finance All Categories Newsletter sign up under the radar The secrets of a 2,000-year-old burnt scroll Researchers used artificial intelligence to 'virtually unwrap' ancient document Newsletter sign up (Image credit: Illustration by Julia Wytrazek / Getty Images) By Chas Newkey-Burden, The Week UK published 10 February 2025 A charred scroll from the Roman town of Herculaneum has been digitally "unwrapped", allowing researchers to peer inside the ancient document after 2,000 years. One word appears more than once in the text that's been deciphered so far, so experts have already been able to hazard a guess at the document's subject matter. Crumbling papyri The ancient scroll, which looks like a lump of charcoal, was charred by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD. It's "too fragile to ever be physically opened", said the BBC. That delicacy was demonstrated when previous papyri "crumbled to dust" when researchers tried to open them, said The Guardian. Subscribe to The Week Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives. SUBSCRIBE & SAVE Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox. From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox. The latest scroll has been taken to a gigantic high-intensity X-ray facility in Oxfordshire, where electrons were "accelerated to almost the speed of light" to produce an X-ray beam powerful enough to "probe the scroll without damaging it", said The Independent. Artificial intelligence can detect the ink without opening the scroll, although this is "easier said than done", said the BBC, because the papyrus and ink are both made from carbon and are "almost indistinguishable from each other". When the document was virtually unrolled on a computer, several columns of text were revealed. One word in the Ancient Greek text, διατροπή, means disgust, and appears twice within a few columns. Human connection The team are delighted with the initial results. Project leader Stephen Parsons said the researchers are "confident we will be able to read pretty much the whole scroll in its entirety". Parsons is the head of Vesuvius Challenge, an international competition for experts who are trying to unlock Herculaneum scrolls. Last year, Youssef Nader in Germany, Luke Farritor in the US, and Julian Schilliger in Switzerland, won the competition’s $700,000 (£558,000) grand prize after reading more than 2,000 Greek letters from another Herculaneum scroll. That scroll is thought to have been written by the epicurean philosopher Philodemus. It "covered sources of pleasure, from music to food", and "explored whether pleasurable experiences" were derived "from the abundant or the scarce", such as the "minor or major constituents of a meal", said The Guardian. It's already thought that the scroll currently being studied in Oxford will cover similar philosophical topics. Meanwhile, Nicole Gilroy, who supervises scrolls' care at Oxford's Bodleian Library, said she was enjoying "that connection with whoever collected them, whoever wrote them, whoever rolled those scrolls up and put them on the shelves", because "there's a real human aspect to it that I just think is really precious". Explore More Artificial intelligence Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com Contact me with news and offers from other Future brandsReceive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsorsBy submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. Chas Newkey-Burden, The Week UK Social Links Navigation Chas Newkey-Burden has been part of The Week Digital team for more than a decade and a journalist for 25 years, starting out on the irreverent football weekly 90 Minutes, before moving to lifestyle magazines Loaded and Attitude. He was a columnist for The Big Issue and landed a world exclusive with David Beckham that became the weekly magazine’s bestselling issue. He now writes regularly for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Metro, FourFourTwo and the i new site. He is also the author of a number of non-fiction books. 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