Two-thousand-year-old scrolls have been transcribed by a team working on Discord
79AD was not a great time to be living in the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum. It was in that year that the nearby volcano Vesuvius erupted, quickly burying the town in volcanic debris, freezing it in time along with nearby Pompeii.
Two thousand years on and Herculaneum today is a popular tourist attraction, with astonishingly well-preserved architecture and vivid mosaics for visitors to enjoy. But one secret has remained: the contents of hundreds of scrolls that were buried and cooked with the eruption.
Despite being some of the few remaining examples of writing from the Roman era, the scrolls are simply too fragile to unravel. So, since they were first rediscovered in 1750, their contents have been a mystery. At least, they were until a bunch of computer scientists in a Discord chat got to work on it.
Back in 2019, Kentucky professor Brent Seales scanned a number of the scrolls at the Diamond Synchrotron – an enormous ring-shaped x-ray facility in Oxfordshire – and then last year Silicon Valley stepped in to decipher the scans.
A group led by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman created the “Vesuvius Challenge” and offered a $700,000 bounty to the first person or team to take the scans and successfully unravel the text of 5% of one of the scrolls, the hope being that the technology the winners developed could then be used to decipher the other 800 scrolls.
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