In Herculaneum, twenty meters of hot mud and ash bury an enormous villa once owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar. Inside, there is a vast library of papyrus scrolls.

The scrolls are carbonized by the heat of the volcanic debris. But they are also preserved. For centuries, as virtually every ancient text exposed to the air decays and disappears, the library of the Villa of the Papyri waits underground, intact.

While digging a well, an Italian farmworker encounters a marble pavement. Excavations unearth beautiful statues and frescoes – and hundreds of scrolls. Carbonized and ashen, they are extremely fragile. But the temptation to open them is great; if read, they would significantly increase the corpus of literature we have from antiquity.

Early attempts to open the scrolls unfortunately destroy many of them. A few are painstakingly unrolled by a monk over several decades, and they are found to contain philosophical texts written in Greek. More than six hundred remain unopened and unreadable.

© EduceLab/University of Kentucky.

Using X-ray tomography and computer vision, a team led by Dr. Brent Seales at the University of Kentucky reads the En-Gedi scroll without opening it. Discovered in the Dead Sea region of Israel, the scroll is found to contain text from the book of Leviticus.

Virtual unwrapping has since emerged as a growing field with multiple successes. Their work went on to show the elusive carbon ink of the Herculaneum scrolls can also be detected using X-ray tomography, laying the foundation for Vesuvius Challenge.

Virtual unwrapping of the En-Gedi scroll. © EduceLab/University of Kentucky.