For nearly two thousand years, the Herculaneum papyri have kept their secrets better than any treasure chest. Buried and carbonized by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, these papyrus scrolls became so fragile that touching them meant destroying them. But now, thanks to artificial intelligence, we can finally read what they contain.
An international team of researchers has managed to get an AI to «virtually unroll» one of these papyri without needing to touch the original. Using high-resolution X-ray scanners and machine learning algorithms, the system has been able to distinguish the charred ink from the burnt papyrus, revealing words and phrases that no one had seen since the time of the Roman Empire. The finding is historic: these texts could contain philosophical, literary, and scientific works that were thought lost forever.
And why should we care? Because the library of Herculaneum is the only complete library of Antiquity that has survived to the present day. While we know most classical texts through medieval copies, here we have the originals. The first fragments already reveal passages about music, the relationship between pleasure and pain, and possibly texts by the philosopher Epicurus. Every new papyrus we manage to read will be like finding a time capsule from two millennia ago, and AI is the only tool capable of opening it without breaking it.
— Marta, for intermittent intelligence.
