Herculaneum papyri

, Plato, or Poseidon sculpture excavated at the Villa of the Papyri Due to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, bundles of scrolls were carbonized by the intense heat of the pyroclastic flows. There may still be a lower section of the Villa's collection that remains buried. Ethel Ross Barker noted in her 1908 Buried Herculaneum: Excavations In the 18th century, the first digs began. The excavation appeared closer to mining projects, as mineshafts were dug, and horizontal subterranean galleries were installed. Workers would place objects in baskets and send them back up. Barker noted in her 1908 Buried Herculaneum, "By the orders of Francis I land was purchased, and in 1828 excavations were begun in two parts apart, under the direction of the architect. Carlo Bonucci. In the year 1868 still further purchases of land were made, and excavations were carried on in an eastward direction till 1875. The total area now open measures 300 by 150 perches (1510 by 756 meters). The limits of the excavations to the north and east respectively are the modern streets of Vico di Mare and Vico Ferrara. It is here only that any portion of ancient Herculaneum may be seen in the open day." The official list amounts to 1,814 rolls and fragments, of which 1,756 had been discovered by 1855. In the 90s it was reported that the inventory now comprises 1,826 papyri, with more than 340 are almost complete, about 970 are partly decayed and partly decipherable, and more than 500 are merely charred fragments. In April 2024, a papyrologist at the University of Pisa found information about Plato's burial place in the Herculaneum papyri by the usage of infrared and X-ray scanners. Post-excavation history In 1802, King Ferdinand IV of Naples offered six rolls to Napoleon Bonaparte in a diplomatic move. In 1803, along with other treasures, the scrolls were transported by Francesco Carelli. Upon receiving the gift, Bonaparte then gave the scrolls to Institut de France under charge of Gaspard Monge and Vivant Denon. In 1810, eighteen unrolled papyri were given to George IV, four of which he presented to the Bodleian Library; the rest are now mainly in the British Library. ==Unrolling==

Since their discovery, previous attempts used rose water, liquid mercury, vegetable gas, sulfuric compounds, papyrus juice, or a mixture of ethanol, glycerin, and warm water, in hopes to make scrolls readable. According to Antonio de Simone and Richard Janko, at first the papyri were mistaken for carbonized tree branches, some perhaps even thrown away or burnt to make heat. Opening a scroll would often damage or destroy the scroll completely. If a scroll had been successfully opened, the original inkexposed to airwould begin to fade. In addition, this form of unrolling often would leave pages stuck together, omitting or destroying additional information. Possibly the first attempts to read the scrolls were made by the artist Camillo Paderni who was in charge of recovered items. Paderni used the method of slicing scrolls in half, copying readable text, by removing papyri layers. This transcription procedure was used for hundreds of scrolls, and in the process destroyed them. In 1756, Abbot Piaggio, conserver of ancient manuscripts in the Vatican Library, used a machine he also invented, In 1877, a papyrus was taken to a laboratory in the Louvre. An attempt to unravel it was made with a "small mill", but it was unsuccessful and was mostly destroyed, leaving only a quarter intact. In 1969, Marcello Gigante founded the creation of the International Center for the Study of the Herculaneum Papyri (Centro Internazionale per lo Studio dei Papiri Ercolanesi; CISPE). With the intention of working toward the resumption of the excavation of the Villa of the Papyri, and promoting the renewal of studies of the Herculaneum texts, the institution began a new method of unrolling. Using the 'Oslo' peeling method, the CISPE team separated individual layers of the papyri. One of the scrolls exploded into 300 parts, and another did similarly but to a lesser extent. MSI helps spot ink because the ink and the charred papyrus have different reflectivities in the 950 nm infrared band. The images are not actually "multispectral", but consist only of data in this 950-nm band. In 2019, a multinational European team reported that SWIR HSI (shortwave-infrared hyperspectral imaging), which combines several bands in the 1000–2500 nm range, detects ink on unrolled papyri better than the 950 nm technique does. Since 2007, a team working with Institut de Papyrologie and a group of scientists from Kentucky have been using X-rays and nuclear magnetic resonance to analyze the artifacts. The team heading the project estimated that if the scrolls were fully unwound they would be between long. In September 2016, Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, successfully used virtual unrolling to read the text of a charred parchment from Israel, the En-Gedi Scroll. Process The virtual unrolling process begins with a volumetric scan of the damaged scroll. Such scans are non-invasive, and generate a virtual 3D model of the scroll in which ink can be distinguished from paper. After the scan, the unrolling process consists only of manipulation of the data so obtained, so the scroll is returned to the archive. This also affords researchers the flexibility to select for scanning methods which yield the greatest contrast between ink and paper and to quickly adapt to improved scanning methods as they develop. In the case of the Herculaneum papyri, the volumetric scan used phase-contrast CT. The virtual model produced by the scan records the composition of the scroll at an array of small regions in space called voxels or volume-pixels. The goal from this point is to construct a two-dimensional representation of the unrolled scroll in such a way that the voxels corresponding to points on the rolled-up scroll can be identified with corresponding pixels on the constructed unrolling. This process happens in three steps: segmentation, texturing and flattening. In 2018, Seales demonstrated a readable virtual unrolling of parts of a Herculaneum papyrus (P.Herc. 118) from the Bodleian Library, at Oxford University, which was given by King Ferdinand of Naples to the Prince of Wales in 1810. The imaging method Seales used involved a handheld scanner called an Artec Space Spider. Vesuvius Challenge In 2023, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and computer scientist Brent Seales announced the Vesuvius Challenge, a competition to "decipher Herculaneum scrolls using 3D X-ray software". The Vesuvius Challenge offered a $700,000 grand prize to be awarded to the first team that could extract four passages of text from two intact scrolls using 3D X-ray scans. On 12 October 2023, the project awarded $40,000 to Luke Farritor, a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Nebraska, for successfully detecting the first word in an unopened scroll: porphyras (). With this milestone "first word" award included, the project has awarded $260,000 in total for segmentation tooling and ink detection (from segmented volumes). On 5 February 2024, the project awarded its 2023 Grand Prize of $700,000 to the winning team and $50,000 each to three runner-up teams for successfully revealing 5% of one scroll, and announced its goal for 2024 of revealing 90% of the four scrolls that it has fully scanned. The uncovered text is believed to be a previously unknown text of Philodemus, "centered on the pleasures of music and food and their effects on the senses". As of 2025, the scans of the scrolls that are being provided to participants in the Vesuvius Challenge for the purpose of fully reading them are Scroll 1 (PHerc. Paris. 4), from the Institut de France, which is 5% read, Scroll 2 (PHerc. Paris 3), from the Institut de France, Scroll 3 (PHerc. 332), from the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, a smaller scroll known as the midollo (marrow), left over from attempts to physically unroll the larger original scroll, Scroll 4 (PHerc. 1667), from the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, similar in size to Scroll 3, and Scroll 5 (PHerc. 172), from the Bodleian Library in Oxford, similar in size to Scroll 1. ==Significance==

in Philodemus' Adversus Sophistas – (P.Herc.1005), col. 5 Until the middle of the 18th century, the only papyri known were a few survivals from medieval times. Most likely, these rolls never would have survived the Mediterranean climate and would have crumbled or been lost. Indeed, all these rolls have come from the only surviving library from antiquity that exists in its entirety. all of them lost, with the exception of a few fragments quoted by other authors. Segments of his works On Providence and Logical Questions were found among the papyri; Parts of a poem on the Battle of Actium have also survived in the library. In May 2018, it was reported that fragments of the lost work Histories by Seneca the Elder had been found on a papyrus scroll (PHerc. 1067). In February 2023, classical scholar Richard Janko announced that he and Seales' team, assisted by artificial intelligence, had managed to read a small part of one heavily damaged, previously unreadable Herculaneum papyrus. The text appeared to be part of a lost work about Alexander the Great and the Diadochi. In April 2024, the research of a papyrologist at the University of Pisa uncovered details about Plato's burial site from the Herculaneum papyri using infrared and X-ray scanning techniques. This research revealed that Plato's tomb was situated within a garden designated for him at the Platonic school, close to the Mouseion dedicated to the muses. ==See also==