The Oxford scroll, donated in the early 19th century by Ferdinand IV, King of Napes and Sicily, is unique among Herculaneum materials due to the chemical composition of its ink which appears more clearly in X-ray scans. Researchers believe that the ink may contain a denser contaminant such as lead, but further testing will be needed to identify the precise ‘recipe’ that has made the ink so much more legible than other scrolls which have been part of the Vesuvius Challenge.
The machine learning employed for this project focuses solely on the detection of the presence of ink as the models do not have any understanding of language and cannot recognise characters. As a result, the next phase - the transcription and translation of the text - is entrusted to the expertise of human scholars.
Richard Ovenden, Bodley’s Librarian & Helen Hamlyn Director of the University Libraries, said: “It’s an incredible moment in history as librarians, computer scientists and scholars of the classical period are collaborating to see the unseen. The astonishing strides forward made with imaging, and AI are enabling us to look inside scrolls that have not been read for almost 2,000 years. This project is a perfect example of libraries, humanities and computer science complementing each other’s expertise to understand our common past.”
The Vesuvius Challenge, the global initiative that was launched in 2023 to discover the contents of the Herculaneum Scrolls without any physical intervention to the scrolls themselves, continues to encourage contributions from researchers across the world.
Dr. Brent Seales, Co-Founder of Vesuvius Challenge and Principal Investigator of EduceLab said: “We are thrilled with the successful imaging of this scroll from the Bodleian Libraries and are grateful to our partners for their support and collaboration. This scroll contains more recoverable text than we have ever seen in a scanned Herculaneum scroll. Despite these exciting results, much work remains to improve our software methods so that we can read the entirety of this and the other Herculaneum scrolls.”