Two millennia after Mount Vesuvius turned a seaside villa's library into charcoal, scientists say they've finally "unrolled" a full ancient text without touching it. Using particle accelerator scans and machine-learning algorithms, a team led by University of Kentucky computer scientist Brent Seales has virtually opened Herculaneum scrolls so fragile they crumble at a touch, revealing at least 230 columns of Greek text across several works and fully accessing the surviving portion of one scroll, reports the Washington Post. The latest haul includes previously unknown sections of "On Gods" by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus, long thought to exist as just a single chapter but now referenced as an eight-part work dealing with "providence," fate, and "invisible entities."
Another scroll fragment appears to probe Stoic ideas like impulse and practical wisdom. The effort is supercharged by the Vesuvius Challenge, a Silicon Valley-backed competition that in 2023 paid $700,000 to students who decoded more than 2,000 characters and is now dangling $1 million to anyone who can read an entire scroll within a year. Only about 10% of the roughly 400 known papyri have undergone what NBC News calls a "digital unwrapping," largely due to cost, leaving what one scholar calls a nearly unmatched ancient library still waiting to be read, reports the Post. "It's been a long time since the classical period, and we feel a distance from that culture. And then you read the words, and then the distance shrinks immediately," Seales marvels to NBC.
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
