UK researcher helps make breakthrough in reading 2,000-year-old Herculaneum scrolls

LEXINGTON, Ky. (WTVQ) — Purple — that’s the first word ever to be read from the 2,000-year-old Herculaneum scrolls, and a University of Kentucky researcher helped with the discovery.

The discovery of the single word was announced Thursday by Brent Seales, a computer science professor at UK, in partnership with EduceLab: A Digital Restoration Initiative, the Library of Institut de France and founders of the Vesuvius Challenge.

The Greek characters, πορφύραc, revealed as meaning “purple dye” or “clothes of purple,” are among the multiple characters and lines of text that have been extracted.

The Herculaneum scrolls are described as the most iconic and inaccessible of the world’s vast collections of damaged manuscripts. They were burned and carbonized by the catastrophic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE and were deemed “unreadable.”

Since then, they were locked away.

“These texts were written by human hands at a time when world religions were emergent, the Roman Empire still ruled and many parts of the world were unexplored,” Seales said. “Much of the writing from this period is lost. But today, the Herculaneum scrolls are unlost.”

The above image depicting the text comes from a wrap of papyrus buried deep within the completely unopened, intact, carbonized scroll.

“Purple dye was highly sought-after in ancient Rome and was made from the glands of sea snails, so the term could refer to purple colour, robes, the rank of people who could afford the dye or even the molluscs,” said Federica Nicolardi, an assistant professor in papyrology at the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II. “But more important than the individual word is reading anything at all. The advance gives us the possibility to recover the text of the entire scroll.”

Seales believes reading the entire collection of Herculaneum scrolls is not only possible but will be the largest discovery from the ancient world to date.