Keynote Exhibit Hall III

On Perseverance: Virtually Unwrapping the Herculaneum Scrolls

Brent Seales

2025 Keynote

Abstract

This talk tells the story of virtual unwrapping, conceived during the rise of digital libraries, computer vision, and large-scale computing, and now realized on some of the most difficult and iconic material in the world - the Herculaneum Scrolls - as a result of the recent phenomena of big data and machine learning. Virtual unwrapping is a non-invasive restoration pathway for damaged written material, allowing texts to be read from objects that are too damaged even to be opened. The Herculaneum papyrus scrolls, buried and carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE and then excavated in the 18th century, are original, classical texts from the shelves of the only library to have survived from antiquity. The 250-year history of science and technology applied to the challenge of opening and then reading them has created a fragmentary, damaged window into their literary and philosophical secrets. In 1999, with more than 400 scrolls still unopened, methods for physical unwrapping were permanently halted. The intact scrolls present an enigmatic challenge: preserved by the fury of Vesuvius, yet still lost. Using a non-invasive imaging approach, we have now shown how to recover their texts, rendering them "unlost." The path we have forged uses high energy physics, artificial intelligence, and the collective power of a global, scientific community inspired by prizes, collaborative generosity, and the common goal of shared glory: reading original classical texts for the first time in 2000 years.

Speaker

Brent Seales

Dr. W. Brent Seales is the Stanley and Karen Pigman Chair of Heritage Science and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Kentucky. He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has held research positions at INRIA SophiaAntipolis, UNC Chapel Hill, Google (Paris), and the Getty Conservation Institute. The Heritage Science research lab (EduceLab) founded by Seales at the University of Kentucky applies techniques in machine learning and data science to the digital restoration of damaged materials. The research program is funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Google. Seales is a co-founder of the Vesuvius Challenge, an international contest formed around the goal of the virtual unwrapping of Herculaneum scrolls. He continues to work with challenging, damaged material (Herculaneum Scrolls, Dead Sea Scrolls), with notable successes in the scroll from En-Gedi (Leviticus), the Morgan MS M.910 (The Acts of the Apostles), and PHerc.Paris.3 and 4 (Philodemus / Epicureanism). The recovery of readable text from still-unopened material has been hailed worldwide as an astonishing achievement fueled by open scholarship, interdisciplinary collaboration, and extraordinary leadership generosity.

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