When Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., it buried hundreds of papyrus scrolls. They were rediscovered in the mid-1700s, remembers Smithsonian magazine, "the only surviving collection of its kind from the Greco-Roman world..."

"But when scholars tried to unroll them, the carbonized manuscripts crumbled to dust." Every generation that followed faced the same dilemma: They could wait for technology to advance, abandoning hope of reading the ancient texts in their own lifetime. Or they could try to open the scrolls themselves — and risk destroying them.

In recent years, researchers have settled on a third option. Using advanced imaging and artificial intelligence, they're deciphering the scrolls without needing to unroll them at all.

The Vesuvius Challenge has accelerated the process by turning it into a public competition, complete with cash prizes. In 2023, a student won $40,000 for deciphering a single word — "purple" — from an unopened scroll. Later, contestants would identify 2,000 Greek characters from one scroll ($700,000) and the title of another ($60,000). Now, for the very first time, researchers have recovered all surviving text from a single scroll. The nearly five-foot-long segment includes roughly 20 columns of ancient Greek philosophy, accessible for the first time in nearly 2,000 years.
"The tech actually does look like magic, but it's not," Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, said at a press conference. (The article points out that Seales partnered with two Silicon Valley investors in 2023 to launch the Vesuvius Challenge, and is now hailing "the restoration of lost voices from the ancient world." Seales has been working on virtually unwrapping the scrolls since the early 2000s. The process involved imaging the bundles of papyrus using technology similar to CT scanners, isolating thin layers and then stitching them together.... "We've developed a systematic and a repeatable approach," Seales told the audience. "Now it's only a matter of time until we read all of the scrolls."