2,000-year-old scroll preserved by a volcano is finally readable. What does it say?

How do you read a 2,000-year-old roll of paper that is too fragile to be opened and too charred to be legible?

In short: How do you read the unreadable?

That was the paradox posed by a volcanically preserved ancient library — and the riddle recently solved by a team of students.

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., the ash and mud buried more than just Pompeii, Italy. The volcano engulfed a nearby library containing hundreds of papyrus scrolls, carbonizing the documents and preserving their ill-fated contents. Sort of.

The ancient library was rediscovered by a farmer in 1750, and the contents became known as the Herculaneum scrolls.

For centuries, these “unreadable” scrolls stumped experts, the University of Kentucky said in a news release. As technology advanced, Brent Seales, a computer science professor at the university, set out to decode these 2,000-year-old pieces of lost knowledge.

Seales, along with tech entrepreneurs Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, launched the Vesuvius Challenge in March 2023. The goal of the competition was to use artificial intelligence, machine learning and crowdsourcing to digitally unroll a Herculaneum scroll and finally reveal the mysterious contents of the text.

A team of three students — Youssef Nader from Egypt, Luke Farritor from the U.S., and Julian Schilliger from Switzerland — did just that. Organizers announced on Monday, Feb. 5, that the trio won the $700,000 grand prize.

The students decoded 15 columns of text from “the very end” of one scroll, co-organizer Friedman wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Experts with the Vesuvius Challenge provided a “preliminary” translation of the Greek text.

“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,” the ancient author wrote. “Such questions will be considered frequently.”

Later, the author wrote that their ideological adversaries “have nothing to say about pleasure, either in general or in particular, when it is a question of definition.”

The scroll ends by saying “… for we do [not] refrain from questioning some things, but understanding/remembering others. And may it be evident to us to say true things, as they might have often appeared evident!”

Challenge organizers wrote that “we can’t escape the feeling that the first text we’ve uncovered is a 2,000-year-old blog post about how to enjoy life.”

Although the decoded text is short and still being studied, experts hailed it as a breakthrough development.

Federica Nicolardi, a papyrus expert with the University of Naples Federico II, told The Guardian that “this is the start of a revolution in Herculaneum papyrology and in Greek philosophy in general. (The Herculaneum scroll library) is the only library to come to us from ancient Roman times.”

So far, only about 5% of one scroll has been decoded. The Vesuvius Challenge hopes to decode four more scrolls in 2024 and eventually read all 800.

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