Ammon News - A 2,000-year-old scroll that was buried in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii was read by three researchers using artificial intelligence (AI).

The researchers were handed a cash prize of $700,000 on Monday (Feb 5) for making the impossible happen.

The Herculaneum papyri have nearly 800 rolled-up Greek scrolls which were carbonised during the 79 CE volcanic eruption in which the ancient Roman town of Pompeii was buried, as per the organisers of the "Vesuvius Challenge."

The scrolls, which appeared similar to logs of hardened ash, were kept at the National Library of Naples and Institut de France in Paris, and have suffered extensive damage and even crumbled after attempts were made to roll them open.

After not being able to open them, the Vesuvius Challenge carried out high-resolution CT scans of four scrolls and offered multiple prizes to speed up the research on them. The amount offered totalled one million dollars.

The three researchers, who won the prize, were Luke Farritor, a student and SpaceX intern from Nebraska, Youssef Nader, a PhD student in Berlin, and Julian Schilliger, a Swiss robotics student.

The artificial intelligence technology was used by the group to distinguish ink from papyrus and to decode the faint and almost unreadable Greek lettering using pattern recognition.

"Some of these texts could completely rewrite the history of key periods of the ancient world," Robert Fowler, the chair of the Herculaneum Society and a classicist, said while speaking to Bloomberg Businessweek magazine.

The researchers had to decipher four passages of at least 140 characters, out of which 85 per cent of characters were recoverable.

Farritor last year decoded the first word written in one of the scrolls, which was the Greek word for "purple."

As per the organisers, the researchers' joint efforts have now resulted in decrypting of nearly five per cent of the scroll.

The scroll's author was "probably Epicurean philosopher Philodemus," writing "about music, food, and how to enjoy life's pleasures," contest organiser Nat Friedman said in a post on X.

The scrolls were discovered in a villa which was earlier believed to be owned by Julius Caesar's patrician father-in-law. The villa had a mostly unexcavated property which had a library that contained thousands more manuscripts.

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