For millennia, human beings have sought to communicate with the dead. We turn to priests, mediums, oracles, psychics, spiritualists—anyone who claims to possess the power to pierce the veil and reach into the world beyond—to bring us messages from our departed loved ones.
As it turns out, all that was bunk. It was also unnecessary. You don’t need mystical powers to hear messages from the dead. All you need is books.
Books are how we communicate across the generations. When you read a book, you can commune with someone who’s been dead for hundreds or thousands of years. Their ideas and their thoughts flow into your mind, gaining new life and vitality.
But like people, books too can die. That’s why we’re so privileged, in this time and place, to witness a spectacular resurrection.
Messages from the dead
In autumn of 79 CE, Mt. Vesuvius erupted. It spewed out a rain of ash and pumice. Its convulsions triggered earthquakes. Then came the pyroclastic flows: boiling torrents of superheated gas, rock, and ash that raced outward like an avalanche, flooding across the landscape, engulfing, incinerating, and burying everything in their path.
The cataclysm buried the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Famously, the ash swallowed people up and hardened around them, creating voids where their bodies decayed. Two thousand years later, archaeologists excavating the site poured plaster into these voids to create eerie sculptures of human beings, frozen in time at the moment of their death.
But that’s not all they found. In Herculaneum, 18th-century archaeologists excavating the town uncovered a buried villa. It was a lavish seaside mansion with a pool, gardens, frescoes, busts and sculptures in marble and bronze.
There was one other thing they discovered in the mansion: a library.
The Herculaneum villa contained more than 1,800 papyrus scrolls. It was a fabulous treasure trove, far and away the largest ancient library that’s survived.
Books are fragile things, all too easily destroyed. It’s rare for them to survive time and entropy. Many of the great writers of past ages are known only from fragments, from scorched and moth-eaten pages preserved by chance, or from scattered excerpts quoted by later authors. There must be many more who aren’t known to us at all because none of their works survived.
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The scrolls of Herculaneum bypassed all of that. Buried under volcanic ash, they’ve slumbered untouched for 2,000 years. It’s a priceless chance to leap across the abyss of time—if only we could read their contents.
The problem is that the scrolls, though intact, were carbonized by the eruption’s intense heat. They look like lumps of charcoal. We know there’s still writing on them, but we had no good way to get at it.
Over the decades, scholars made numerous attempts to unroll the scrolls: by hand, with special machines, or with chemical treatments. They gleaned scraps of text from some, but invariably destroyed them in the process. Many more disintegrated without giving up their secrets.
You can imagine how frustrating this was. For decades, the scrolls of Herculaneum were one of the most tantalizing mysteries of archaeology. There could be previously unknown works by Aristotle, Homer, Sappho, Sophocles. Long-lost literary treasures, right at our fingertips—but unreachable.
Until now.
The Vesuvius Challenge
In March 2023, a team of scientists and entrepreneurs announced the Vesuvius Challenge. They released detailed 3-D images of several scrolls, created by X-ray CT scanning at micrometer resolution. The hope was that advances in computer science would make it possible to “virtually unroll” the scrolls, allowing us to read them without destroying them. They offered over $1 million in prizes as an added incentive.
This month, they announced a winner. The $700,000 grand prize went to Youssef Nader, Julian Schilliger and Luke Farritor, a team of student researchers from Egypt, Switzerland and the United States.
Their code parses the 2-D slices of a crumpled, distorted, rolled-up scroll, identifies corresponding sections, and assembles them into a flattened image. Then they trained a machine-learning model to recognize the faint traces of carbonized ink on carbonized papyrus, generating readable text.
Your first thought, like mine, may have been to worry that the revealed text was an AI hallucination. However, the prize committee published an explanation of how they know it isn’t. The machine-learning model used by the winning team doesn’t output whole letters. It examines each microscopic pixel of the scroll surface and returns a verdict of ink present or no ink present—nothing more. When these billions of pixels are assembled into an image, they form legible letters. That couldn’t happen by chance, which is how we know the AI got it right.
The text revealed comprises more than 2,000 Greek characters, or about 5% of one scroll. The next prize, for 2024, will be to use this method to decode 90% of four scrolls. The winning code was published as open source, so anyone can refine and build on it.
As the prize committee says in its announcement:
The thoughts of our ancestors, locked in mud and ash for 2000 years, hidden in darkness — now, with the light of a worldwide effort shining upon them, finally seen again.
So what does it say?
The resurrected scroll is a treatise on Epicurean philosophy. It may have been authored by a philosopher named Philodemus, who’s known to have written some of the other works in the library. What’s been decoded so far is an inquiry into the nature of pleasure:
The general subject of the text is pleasure, which, properly understood, is the highest good in Epicurean philosophy. In these two snippets from two consecutive columns of the scroll, the author is concerned with whether and how the availability of goods, such as food, can affect the pleasure which they provide.
Do things that are available in lesser quantities afford more pleasure than those available in abundance? Our author thinks not: “as too in the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant.” However, is it easier for us naturally to do without things that are plentiful? “Such questions will be considered frequently.”
Since this is the end of a scroll, this phrasing may suggest that more is coming in subsequent books of the same work.
No doubt, there will be much more to come soon. If this method worked for one scroll, it should work for the rest.
The Herculaneum scrolls, once we fully decode them, are a priceless opportunity to lift the curtain of time and peer into a long-vanished era. There may be new historical revelations, poetic gems and literary delights, and insights into how ancient people lived and how they saw the world and their place in it. We’ll be able to know them with an intimacy that people have almost never enjoyed with their distant ancestors.
After nearly 2,000 years buried in the dark, these ghosts are about to rise into the light. How will we greet them, and what will they have to tell us?