On perhaps the 24th of October, 79 CE, in southern Italy, Mt. Vesuvius erupted with more force many atom bombs. Within 48 hours, the nearby cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried under up to 80 feet of volcanic ash; thousands of people died in the calamity. In Herculaneum, one lavish villa with an extensive library was buried. In the 1500s, some locals digging below the surface of the land discovered ancient structures and artefacts. They searched and found what looked like small burned logs that turned out to be ancient scrolls from the library, with Greek writing in them. Through the years, antiquarians and then archeologists made efforts to unroll the scrolls and read the writing, through laborious and sometime futile procedures. But in the process more writing was destroyed than was recovered.
In 1991, Dr. Roger Macfarlane moved into my neighborhood, becoming a neighbor, friend, and colleague. He was a classicist at Brigham Young University (where I was a professor of philosophy, specializing in ancient Greek philosophy) who studied ancient Greek and Roman literature. He became interested in a new project to read the ancient scrolls from Herculaneum. Recruiting some BYU professors of engineering, he asked them if they could find a way to read the ancient scrolls, in which black ink on blackened papyrus was almost illegible. They found that by using a process called multi-spectral imaging, they could discover a wavelength of light (in the infrared spectrum) in which the image of a blackened papyrus would turn white on a computer screen, while the written letters remained black, so that the writing could be discerned. This method has since been applied to other media, including murals in a Mayan temple in southern Mexico, which allowed an older mural painted over by a newer mural to be viewed without damage to the newer layer. The fragments of opened scrolls were scanned and digitized by a BYU team between 1999 and 2011. Images obtained by this method often accompany publications of and about the fragments.
In 2007, a professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky named Brent Seales proposed using X-rays to read unwrapped scrolls without touching and inevitably damaging them. The project seemed impossible and potentially dangerous to most of the archaeologists and librarians overseeing the surviving scrolls. At first, it is true, the technology was not powerful enough to distinguish what was inside, but in recent years Seales and his team have devised or adapted advances in imaging and computer science to map and articulate what is inside the scrolls, like doing an MRI on a human body. What seemed a quixotic dream has become a reality through the researcher’s dogged pursuit of his goal.
In 2016, Dr. Seales was given access to digital data from an excavation at En-Gedi in Israel, where a carbonized scroll (this one made of parchment or animal skin rather than papyrus) was found in a burned-out ancient synagogue. When he applied his software to the data, he was able to unroll the scroll virtually and display the contents. The Hebrew writing inside appeared as if by magic, and the archaeologists of the project were quickly able to identify the scroll as a copy of the Book of Leviticus from about 300 CE, making it the earliest surviving manuscript from a synagogue. This success was announced in the New York Times and other news outlets. Suddenly, the keepers of the Herculaneum scrolls, who had remained skeptical of his project, wanted Seales to scan their papyri too.
The University of Kentucky project to unwrap the Herculaneum scrolls still faced some formidable challenges. The ink on these scrolls was carbon-based, like the papyrus rolls themselves. The ink on the En-Gedi scroll had metallic compounds, which showed up easily on X-rays. But the carbon-based ink of the Herculaneum scrolls did not emerge in images of scans. Further research was needed to distinguish the ink from the papyrus and to identify the letters and writing within the scrolls. In 2023 the Vesuvius Challenge was announced, offering prize money to the research team that could solve the remaining problems. Over 1,000 research teams participated, making rapid progress on the problem and digitizing most of four scrolls. The ink on the scrolls was now visible in the scans and the techniques used could be applied to other scrolls.
Two years ago, my colleague Michael Shaw of Utah Valley University, with whom I have collaborated for about 20 years, took a group of students on a study abroad to Naples, Italy. While he was visiting the site of Herculaneum, a passer-by on a motorcycle stopped and offered to give them a tour of the site. They thought he was a tour guide, but he turned out to be Mario Grimaldi, one of the leading archaeologists of the Herculaneum site. He subsequently introduced Mike and his students to some of the leading researchers on the papyri. When he returned home, Mike started planning a major conference at UVU, for which he obtained university and outside funding, including from BYU.
This conference titled “The Buried Library,” took place last week (April 7-10, 2026), with most of the major players in research on the Herculaneum papyri participating, from Italy, the UK, and the US. Just this year sixteen of the unread Herculaneum scrolls have been virtually unwrapped and digitized and more are being processed. The contents still need to be transcribed, read, and translated. But the speed with which they are being processed is unheard of. Previously it would take up to two years to process a single scroll, with much of the writing being damaged and lost in the process; now they can be processed and digitized in days or hours with almost no damage. Furthermore, through computer programs, fragments of a previously-damaged manuscript can be marked off and virtually moved around like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to fill in gaps where they might fit.
This whole process is a modern miracle. I am in awe of the advances and the people who have made them. I can read ancient Greek, but I am a consumer, not a producer, of written texts. I congratulate all the specialists in ancient papyri and paleography, classification and conservation, imaging, computer programming, AI research, transcription, translation, and publication of the ancient scrolls. At the end of the week, my friend and former neighbor Roger Macfarlane was appointed to the board of directors of the international foundation that manages the Herculaneum Papyri.
BYU and UVU are associated with the University of Kentucky and the Frederic II University of Naples as partners in a great enterprise. The present generation of students of the ancient world will have a new library of ancient works to translate, publish, and explore, such as has not happened since the Renaissance. The coincidence of having dedicated scholars, inspired researchers in both ancient lore and contemporary technology, meetings and cross-fertilization of diverse disciplines including papyrology, paleography, archaeology, geology, history, computer science, artificial intelligence, library science, and preservation of antiquities is truly remarkable. It is a reminder that in the present time of specialized research, interdisciplinary collaboration among international researchers is needed more than ever.