The Scroll of Herculaneum, buried during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, is read for the first time in 2,000 years

For almost 2,000 years, no one could read a word from ancient scrolls buried during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius – until today.

The first word is purple.

More specifically Porphyras, but purple in English.

The ancient text comes from the Herculaneum Papyri, a collection of 1,800 scrolls buried during the deadly eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, which wiped out the city of Pompeii.

The nearby city of Herculaneum was covered in a twenty-meter-thick layer of ash, preserving many of its secrets from the time of the disaster.

However, after nearly 2,000 years, the scrolls are too fragile to unfold, although early researchers tried to destroy some of them. Researchers say they represent the perfect storm of important content, massive damage, extreme vulnerability and hard-to-detect ink.

To find out what they were hiding, a team from the University of Kentucky worked with Oxfordshire-based science facility Diamond Light Force to scan two scrolls and four fragments to discover the words they contained.

The task took several years: Professor Bent Seales of the University of Kentucky and his team started scanning in Oxford in 2019.

“Diamond Light Source is an absolutely critical element in our long-term plan to extract Scripture from damaged material,” Professor Seales said at the time. “It provides unprecedented clarity and control over the images we can capture, as well as access to an expert group of scientists who understand our challenges and are committed to helping us succeed.”

“Ancient texts are rare and valuable and simply cannot be revealed in any other known way.”

One of the biggest problems with deciphering the scrolls, apart from the fact that they cannot be unrolled, is that the carbon-based ink used does not show up on X-rays, unlike metal-based inks. However, new technology developed by Diamond Light Force allowed them to amplify the ink signal from within, bringing the text back to life.

The next challenge was deciphering the real meaning of the writing. To that end, the team made the scrolls public, organized the Vesuvius Challenge, and offered $40,000 to the first person who could identify 10 letters in a 4 cm² area of ​​the scroll.

That prize went to 21-year-old computer science student Luke Farritor, who became the first person in nearly two millennia to read the scrolls after finding the words “purple dye.”

Shortly afterwards, Youssef Nader, a biorobotics graduate, made the same discovery with even clearer results and won an additional $10,000 prize.

The scrolls were unearthed during excavations in the city in 1752 and were found in a villa belonging to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law.

The majority of the 1,800 scrolls are in the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, although a few were given as gifts to dignitaries by the King of Naples and ended up in the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the British Library and the Institut de France.