A charred scroll recovered from a Roman villa buried under ash during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE was identified as a work by the ancient Greek philosopher Philodemus. Researchers discovered the title and author of the Herculaneum papyrus after scanning it with X-rays that digitally unwrapped the sheets, revealing details for the first time using this method.
The text is part of a multi-volume work titled On Evil, written by Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher of the first century BCE. The scroll contains traces of ink that reveal the ancient Greek word for "disgust" at least twice, providing insights into the content of the work.
The papyrus is one of three from Herculaneum housed at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford. It was scanned last July at Diamond Light Source, the UK's national synchrotron facility in Oxfordshire. Unusually, some ink was visible in the X-ray images of the scroll, which allowed researchers to identify the text.
"It's the first scroll where the ink could just be seen on the scan," said Dr. Michael McOsker, a papyrologist at University College London. "Nobody knew what it was about. We didn't even know if it had writing on," he added in comments reported by The Guardian.
The scroll is among hundreds found in the library of a Roman villa thought to have been owned by Julius Caesar's father-in-law. The villa was buried under tons of ash and pumice when the city of Herculaneum, along with Pompeii, was destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius.
Excavations in the 18th century recovered many of the ancient papyri, most of which are held at the National Library of Naples. The documents are so badly burnt that they crumble when researchers try to unroll them, and the ink is unreadable on the carbonized papyrus. Although most papyri were preserved only as charred fragments, new technologies now allow for non-destructive reading of their content.
The latest work builds on earlier breakthroughs from the Vesuvius Challenge, a global competition launched in 2023 that offers cash prizes for progress in reading the scrolls using three-dimensional X-rays. Sean Johnson, as part of the Vesuvius Challenge, and separately Marcel Roth and Mika Novak at the University of Würzburg, identified the title and author of the text in the innermost section of the scroll. This research won the first prize of $60,000 (£45,200) in the competition.
In addition to On Evil and Philodemus, an "A" that appears on the scroll may indicate that it is the first part of the work. On Evil includes at least ten volumes covering topics such as arrogance, greed, flattery, and household management.
Dr. Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky who co-founded the Vesuvius Challenge, stated, "We see ink samples in many of the new papyri we have scanned, but we have not yet turned them into coherent text." He explained, "That's our current bottleneck: converting the massive scan data into organized sections that are properly segmented, virtually flattened, and enhanced so that the evidence of ink can then be interpreted as actual text."
Research activity is accelerating, with eighteen scrolls scanned at Diamond in March, and another twenty being analyzed this week at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble. Soon, experts hope to know much more about the papyri.
"The pace is ramping up very quickly," said Dr. McOsker. "All of the technological progress that's been made on this has been in the last three to five years and on the timescales of classicists, that's unbelievable," he concluded. "Everything we're getting from the Herculaneum library is new to us."
Although traces of ink were identified in many new scrolls, scientists emphasize that converting these data into coherent texts remains a challenge. The development of artificial intelligence software and algorithms has been instrumental in making progress. Last year, a team of students with computer science knowledge shared the grand prize of $700,000 in the Vesuvius Challenge for developing AI software that allowed them to read 2,000 ancient Greek letters from another scroll.
The discovery of the scroll was made as part of an international collaboration involving University College London, the University of Oxford, and the Bodleian Libraries. The scientific approach of using X-ray scanning to extract details from ancient papyrus is being used successfully, enabling scholars to uncover lost works of antiquity without causing further damage to the fragile materials.
The article was written with the assistance of a news analysis system.