A Volcano Turned a Library Into Charcoal. AI Is Reading It Anyway.

For 2,000 years, opening these books meant destroying them. Then computers learned to read pages that had never been opened.

In AD 79, Mount Vesuvius buried Pompeii and Herculaneum. Inside one villa at Herculaneum was something almost unheard of from the ancient world: a private library filled with papyrus scrolls.

The heat destroyed them and preserved them at the same time. The scrolls were cooked into black, brittle cylinders that looked more like lumps of charcoal than books. Hundreds survived, but many were so fragile that trying to unroll them could tear them apart. That left historians with a ridiculous problem: the only surviving library from the Greco-Roman world was sitting right in front of them, and reading it could destroy it.

Then, in 2023, a 21-year-old computer-science student named Luke Farritor found a word inside one of those unopened scrolls: purple.

Farritor had used machine learning on 3D X-ray scans of the burned papyrus. The ink was extremely hard to see because both the ink and the scroll had been turned mostly into carbon. Instead of looking for obvious black letters on a light page, the system learned to spot tiny changes in the surface where ink had once dried.

For the first time in roughly 2,000 years, letters appeared from inside a scroll nobody had opened. The breakthrough sounded futuristic, but scientists had been slowly building toward it for years.

First They Learned to Unroll a Book Without Touching It

In 1970, archaeologists working at an ancient synagogue in En-Gedi, Israel, found several burned lumps inside the building’s Holy Ark. One of them had once been a scroll, but it was in terrible shape. The material had burned, collapsed and become so fragile that handling it could cause pieces to fall away. For decades, researchers mostly left it alone because opening it would probably destroy it.

Computer scientist Brent Seales and his team eventually tried something different. They scanned the scroll using micro-CT, creating a detailed 3D picture of everything inside it. Software then followed the twisted layers of the scroll, separated them digitally and flattened them on a computer screen. Instead of unrolling the real scroll, they unrolled the scan.

In 2016, researchers revealed Hebrew text from the Book of Leviticus while the burned scroll itself stayed closed. A page no longer had to physically come out of an object before somebody could read it.

Then They Found Writing Someone Had Tried to Erase

A different problem showed up in a medieval book called the Archimedes Palimpsest. Hundreds of years ago, someone had copied works by the Greek mathematician Archimedes onto parchment. Later, another person scraped away much of the old writing and reused the pages for a religious book. Centuries after that, forged paintings were added on top.

The Archimedes text was buried underneath all of it. Researchers eventually used powerful X-rays at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory. The X-rays detected iron left behind by the original ink, allowing parts of the erased writing to appear underneath the newer text and paintings.

The lesson was simple: writing could disappear from human sight without actually disappearing from the material. If ink left behind some physical trace, a machine might still find it. That idea would become very useful at Herculaneum.

Then Computers Opened a 300-Year-Old Letter

Another group faced an even stranger problem. Before envelopes became common, people often folded letters into complicated locked shapes using tucks, folds, slits and seals. Historians call the technique letterlocking.

One collection contained hundreds of European letters from the 1600s that had never been delivered. Some were still sealed more than 300 years later. Historians could simply open them, but doing that would destroy evidence showing exactly how the letters had originally been folded.

So researchers scanned them instead. In 2021, a team reported that it could use X-ray scans and software to digitally unfold sealed letters into flat, readable pages without physically opening them.

One letter from 1697 turned out to be fairly ordinary. A man named Jacques Sennacques was asking his cousin for a copy of a relative’s death notice. It was not some great lost secret of history, but the technology mattered far more than the letter itself. A computer had taken a piece of paper folded into a complicated shape for centuries and opened it without touching it. Now researchers could handle strange geometry too.

Then They Started Reading Entire Books Hidden Under Other Books

At St. Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt, researchers were dealing with another ancient form of recycling. Parchment used to be expensive, so scribes sometimes scraped old writing from a page and wrote something new on top. These reused manuscripts are called palimpsests.

The old words were supposed to be gone, but they often left faint traces behind. Researchers with the Sinai Palimpsests Project photographed pages under different kinds of light, including ultraviolet and infrared. Different inks and parchment react differently to different wavelengths, so computer processing can make the newer writing fade while bringing the erased text underneath back into view.

The project has recovered lost writing in Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Georgian, Latin and other languages. Some of the recovered texts survive nowhere else. By this point, scientists had learned several useful tricks: they could see inside objects, digitally flatten pages, detect writing that human eyes could not see and separate old text from newer layers.

Herculaneum needed all of those tricks at once.

Then They Went Back to the Burned Library

The Herculaneum scrolls were almost a worst-case scenario. They were rolled tightly, crushed, burned and distorted. Worse, the ink and the papyrus had both been carbonized, which made the writing extremely difficult to distinguish in an ordinary X-ray scan.

But technology had caught up. CT scanners could see inside the scroll. Software could follow the buried layers. Computers could flatten those layers digitally, and machine learning could search the surface for incredibly faint signs of ink.

In 2023, the Vesuvius Challenge opened the problem to researchers around the world. Organizers released scans, software and tools and offered prizes for anyone who could recover readable text.

Farritor found porphyras, meaning purple. Another competitor, Youssef Nader, independently found writing in the same area using his own machine-learning method. Then Farritor, Nader and robotics student Julian Schilliger worked together.

By early 2024, the team had recovered more than 2,000 characters from 15 columns of text. The black lump was slowly becoming a book again.

And the Book Was Talking About Enjoying Life

For centuries, people wondered what might be hidden inside the Herculaneum library. Lost histories, unknown plays, forgotten science and missing works of philosophy were all possibilities.

The first large section recovered by the Vesuvius Challenge was philosophical. It discussed pleasure, including things like food, music, abundance and even the colour purple. The scroll appeared to explore whether something becomes more enjoyable depending on how common or rare it is.

There is something wonderfully strange about that. A volcano buried a philosopher’s thoughts about enjoying life in AD 79, and nearly 2,000 years later, AI helped humans hear the conversation again.

The Real Story Is Everything We Thought Was Unreadable

Herculaneum gets the attention because the scrolls look dramatic and nobody knows exactly what else might be inside the library, but the bigger story is much larger.

Museums and archives contain burned books, sealed letters, damaged manuscripts, erased writing, waterlogged pages and documents too fragile to open safely. For most of history, there was a hard limit: if you could not physically reach the writing, you could not read it.

That limit is disappearing. The En-Gedi scroll showed that computers could virtually unwrap a burned book. The Archimedes Palimpsest showed that machines could recover writing hidden under other writing. The sealed letters showed that software could unfold complicated documents without opening them, while the Sinai manuscripts showed that erased text could be pulled back into view.

Then AI made it much easier to search the huge amounts of messy data these scans produce. The result is a new kind of archaeology, where researchers are no longer limited to reading what survived in readable condition. We are beginning to read things that survived unreadable.

And Herculaneum is still giving up more. In 2025, researchers identified the title and author of another sealed scroll as part of On Vices by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus, and work on virtually opening and reading the collection is continuing.

For nearly 2,000 years, the library looked cooked. All we needed was a super intelligence to read it. Hopefully its something interesting!