Unspooling the Charred Scrolls of Vesuvius
How
computer scientist Brent Seales triumphed on an impossible mission.
Oct 31, 2025
Odysseus overcame many obstacles during his 10-year voyage
home. The hero of Homer’s ancient epic The Odyssey might have
a modern-day counterpart — computer scientist Brent
Seales MS’88, PhD’91.
A professor at the University of Kentucky–Lexington, Seales
has made it his life’s work to accomplish a seemingly impossible task — to
“virtually unwrap” hundreds, possibly thousands, of priceless scrolls that were
buried and carbonized when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79.
Sixty feet of superheated gas and rock smothered the
coastal Roman resort town of Herculaneum in the Bay of Naples. Author Pliny the
Younger fled the cataclysm and described it this way: “A dense black cloud was
coming up behind us, spreading over the earth like a flood. Many besought the
aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no gods left, and that the
universe was plunged into eternal darkness for evermore.”
Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso
Caesoninus, was likely the original owner of a three-story villa there.
Statesmen like Piso often had libraries that contained as many as 40,000
scrolls.
Diggers discovered about 800 of those papyri, now known as
the Herculaneum scrolls, in 1752. They look like
charred, shrunken, burned pastries. At first scientists tried to unroll the
brittle relics, a futile effort that caused many to crumble. “Turn’d to a sort
of charcoal, so brittle, that, being touched, it falls readily into ashes,”
wrote one early examiner.
The carbonized scrolls are so brittle that unwrapping them
would reduce them to ashes. EDUCELAB/UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY
Scholars hope Piso’s library, the only intact ancient
library ever found, may contain lost treasures — plays by Aeschylus and
Euripides, poems by Sappho, histories of Rome by Livy, and possibly works that
document Christianity’s earliest years.
By all accounts, this find ranks with the Dead
Sea Scrolls as one of the greatest discoveries in the history
of archaeology. And Seales has led the way to tease out its mysteries.
Helpers on the Journey
Homer dubbed Odysseus a “man skilled in all ways of
contending,” a description that fits Seales. He, too, has overcome daunting
troubles. Technological riddles in the fields of AI and x-ray tomography
stymied him. Museums denied him access to materials. In one case, his scholarly
collaborators claimed success without mentioning him.
Through his resourcefulness, patience, and collaborative
spirit, Seales won powerful allies — among them, Silicon Valley entrepreneur
Nat Friedman. It was Friedman’s idea to start the crowd-sourced Vesuvius Challenge,
an international competition that awards prizes to teams who succeed in reading
the Herculaneum papyri. In early 2024, a winning team revealed five percent of
a scroll written by Piso’s resident scholar Philodemus, a follower of
philosopher Epicurus.
Seales believes that in a year or two, he and his team will
overcome remaining hurdles and enable classicists to read all the scrolls. The
ultimate goal? Exhume and decipher thousands of still-buried papyri.
When his odyssey began 30 years ago, no one was working on
this. “No one else cared. People thought it was impossible,” he recalls. “I
didn’t feel like an underdog. I just felt like a true pioneer. It was real
exploration.”
The Road to Wisconsin
Seales speaks from the heart. A balding bear of a man with
bushy black eyebrows, he has sparkling eyes, an infectious low-key confidence,
and an easy way with words.
He grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, when personal computing
was just beginning to take off. Raised in a modest household in the village of
Springville in western New York, he caught tech fever at a young age. “For me,
computing represented the paramount American experience where you have upward
mobility. You could have pioneering exploration. You could have everything the
New World is about,” he says.
A lover of math and music, he played violin at his church.
The University of Louisiana–Lafayette gave him a double scholarship to study
computer science and music.
Seales says that scholars should soon be able to read all
800 of the Herculaneum scrolls that have been unearthed so far. But the
ultimate goal is to exhume and decipher thousands more papyri from a library
that ranks along with the Dead Sea Scrolls as one of the greatest finds in the
history of archaeology. UK PHOTO
For graduate school, Seales says, “I shot for the moon. I
couldn’t imagine anything better than to be at Wisconsin.” Strapped for money
when he applied to the university, he prayed it would “just let me work and pay
my own way.” Unlike other schools, the UW gave him a four-year guarantee of
funding.
At UW–Madison, Charles Dyer, professor emeritus of computer
sciences and biostatistics and medical informatics, was Seales’s doctoral
thesis adviser. It was an ideal match. Both men were young. Dyer was only 10
years older than Seales. Both craved long-distance ordeals. Dyer ran marathons.
Seales thrived in Madison’s cycling culture and pedaled in weekend races.
Even then, artificial intelligence’s potential fascinated
Seales. Dyer was one of the first scientists to study computer vision, an
AI-related field that gripped Seales’s imagination. Under Dyer, he wrote
algorithms that transformed two-dimensional photos into 3-D images, a technique
Mars Rovers would use to traverse the Red Planet without commands from Earth.
“I give Brent a huge credit for sticking with his research
and making steady progress for years without a lot of big reinforcement,” says
Dyer.
Perfecting X-Ray Vision
How does Seales get scrolls that look like flame-broiled
croissants to surrender nearly 2,000-year-old secrets?
First, using a technology similar to that used by a
computed tomography (CT) scanner, he takes a 3-D scan of a scroll. Its beam
slices the scroll into about 15,000 vertical images. Each unimaginably thin
slice is like a tree ring. It reveals how heat and pressure distorted the
scroll’s overlapping wraps.
Then he virtually flattens the scroll. So far, this has
required researchers to trace distorted rings, a process Seales hopes will soon
be automated. Correct tracing of rings lets his software create an accurate 3-D
image that is flattened to two-dimensions.
Seales used “virtual unwrapping” to read the text from the
ancient En-Gedi scroll, revealing it to be the beginning of the Book of
Leviticus. It’s one of the oldest Hebrew biblical texts ever found, outside of
the Dead Sea Scrolls. BRENT SEALES, UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY
Finally, because the Romans used an ink that scans cannot
capture, Seales employs machine learning to detect nearly invisible texture
differences in blackened papyrus, thus making letters visible.
His saga of discovery has been as convoluted as one of his
scrolls. It began in London’s British Museum in 1995 with a digital imaging
project to improve readability of the earliest copy of Beowulf. Seales
used a NASA technique called MSI, multi-spectral imaging, to make letters pop
out against their background. This happens because iron-based ink reflects
light, especially ultraviolet light, differently than a background of
parchment, vellum, or papyrus.
Based on that work, he wrote a paper about digital
restoration. The result? “No one cared,” Seales says. “But I still look at it
as one of those turning-point papers for me, because I articulated the
principles around digital restoration that were going to be amazing. In that
paper, I wrote that the pinnacle of the restoration would be complete virtual
unwrapping.”
Seales had a brainstorm. He had seen enough wizened
documents to know the forces of time and temperature often caused pages to grow
wavy. Sometimes the distortions were so bad they hid letters.
He was working on a ninth-century vellum copy of The Consolation ofPhilosophy by
Boethius. Voilà — Seales performed a virtual flattening. His smoothing of the
manuscript made letters reveal themselves for the first time in centuries.
The Odyssey Takes a Detour
Seales learned about the Herculaneum scrolls when
classicist Richard Janko at the University of Michigan contacted him in 2004.
He told Seales about their horrible condition, that others had destroyed some,
and asked if he could make them readable.
“I knew instantly — instantly — that if it could be solved,
it would be amazing, and the world would think it was amazing,” says Seales.
With some difficulty, he got funding to proceed.
To move forward, Seales needed his own CT scanner, one that
was portable. He and a partner at Iowa State University tried but failed to
build one he could bring to the field to collect his own data. So Seales
decided to partner with the Belgian company SkyScan to use this cutting-edge
technology.
In 2005 at Oxford, he gave a talk to the Friends of
Herculaneum Society. He told them that since the late 1970s, Egyptologists had
put mummies in CT scanners. Since scrolls were also wrapped, surely they could
be unspooled. All he and his students had to do was write software to interpret
the machine’s data in combination with the imaging technology he had started to
use 10 years earlier with Beowulf.
To demonstrate his proposal, he made a scroll, lettered it
with iron-based ink, and scanned it. The result showed the scroll unrolling
with letters visible on its surface.
Next, Seales asked the National Library in Naples, where
most of the scrolls are kept, if he could perform similar magic there. “It sent
me a response that didn’t say, ‘No.’ It said, ‘Hell, no.’ But it was in
Italian, so it sounded better than that,” says Seales.
Undaunted, he successfully approached the Institut de
France, which also held scrolls. With a National Science Foundation grant,
Seales convinced SkyScan’s founder, the Russian physicist Alexander Sasov, to
send his portable CT scanner to the academy in 2009, and he was able to scan
two scrolls.
He was coming off a period of “unbridled enthusiasm,” but
the results crushed him. The internal complexity of the scrolls “broke” his
software. The layers inside the scroll were far from uniform. “They were all
tangled and mashed together. My software could not follow them reliably,” he
says.
There was another problem. The Romans used carbon-based
ink, not ink with an iron base. The letters remained invisible. “I didn’t know
what to do. It was a deeply discouraging moment,” he says.
Divine Intervention
In moments of doubt, Seales tried to take comfort
from William Wordsworth’s poem SeptemberSeptember, 1819, which
reads:
O ye, who patiently explore
The wreck of Herculanean lore,
What rapture! could ye seize
Some Theban fragment, or unroll
One precious, tender-hearted scroll …
“But in fact, the scrolls are not tender-hearted scrolls,”
he says. “Wordsworth was wrong. They’re hard-hearted scrolls. Hard-hearted.”
For the next few years, progress was slow. Seales found
inspiration — and new collaborators — in Paris in 2011 when he was invited to
join forces with the Google Cultural Institute. Since renamed Google
Arts and Culture, it creates services to boost digital access to the
arts.
“We came along at a time when Brent was at a dead end,”
says Steve Crossan, who ran the Google project. He felt sure the Kentucky
professor would overcome his obstacles. “He was completely tenacious, and he
never gave up. It tends to be the case that if you don’t give up, eventually
you succeed.”
Both Crossan and Dyer agree that a key to Seales’s success
is his collaborative spirit. “He doesn’t require that he owns the whole of the
solution,” says Crossan.
“In the research area,” Dyer says, “people are often very
protective of their own work. Not Brent.”
For the next few years, Seales improved the quality of his
algorithms so they could conquer the complex convolutions inside scrolls. Then
came what some might call divine intervention — Israeli archaeologists asked
him to virtually unwrap a carbonized parchment scroll from the ancient town
of Ein Gedi. It turned out to be a portion of the
Book of Leviticus.
Meanwhile, Seales continued to attack the ink-readability
problem. He explored using x-ray phase-contrast tomography, which can reveal
minute changes in density in a material. Because of the difficulty of getting
permission to use such a machine, he teamed with European scientists who could
get the go-ahead.
Disappointment hit again. The scholars he trusted published
a paper — without including his name — that claimed they had solved the problem
of seeing non-iron-based ink. The media reported the Herculaneum scrolls could
now be read. But when Seales studied his ex-colleagues’ data, he realized they
were faulty. They had achieved nothing, he says.
Once again, he found himself profoundly discouraged,
“because I knew those people. I had worked with them under the assumption we’d
all be working together, and they cut me out so they could run forward,” he
says.
A Triumphal Moment
Meanwhile, in Israel, Seales’s supercharged algorithms
worked. He could virtually unwrap the scroll, and, luckily, scannable metal was
in the Biblical ink. The scroll turned out to be one of the oldest copies of
the Book of Leviticus and dated from the third or fourth century AD. The
subject of the first chapter? Burnt offerings.
With the National Library in Naples continuing to block
Seales’s access to its treasure house of scrolls, he won permission from
Oxford’s Bodleian Library to scan a Herculaneum fragment known as P.
Herc. 118 for signs of ink. This was not a scroll, but bits of a
scroll glued to tissue paper.
Seales and his former doctoral student Stephen Parsons
examine a Herculaneum scroll at a science facility in
England.EDUCELAB/UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY
The letter c could be seen with the naked
eye against the papyrus background. The problem was getting the computer to
recognize it. “We made the letter appear from the tomography after training the
method to recognize the evidence of the ink,” he says. “Building the method to
make it visible from the tomography alone was the big breakthrough, because we
knew that for full scrolls, we would only have the tomography for the inner
layers, not actual photographs.” This was the triumphal moment. Now Seales knew
that entire scrolls could be read.
By this time, he had realized that AI and machine learning
were “the rocket fuel” that would vastly speed reading of invisible ink. “In
2015 when I did experiments with AI, I realized it was going to be a game
changer,” he says. “It was the key that unlocked everything.”
The man who helped turn the key was Friedman, the former
CEO of GitHub, Microsoft’s open-source platform for software developers. During
the COVID lockdown in 2020, Friedman had spare time. He became curious about
imperial Rome. Soon he was baking Roman-era bread and learning about the
Herculaneum scrolls.
“I thought Brent’s project was incredibly cool,” says
Friedman. “I wanted to follow along and be a fanboy.”
In 2022 he invited Seales to his hush-hush Frontier Camp, a
secretive gathering of techie wizards in the northern California woods. The
goal? Win funding for Seales or at least win offers of help.
When the duo struck out, Friedman proposed the Vesuvius
Challenge, with first prize going to the scholar who could read four passages
of 140 characters. Within months, three college students shared the $700,000
honors. The 2024 prize dramatically ups the challenge — it goes to a competitor
who can decipher 90 percent of four scrolls.
Like Seales, Friedman believes all the scrolls will be
readable in short order, once the hand-tracing of wraps inside the scrolls is
automated.
Hoping for “New Arrivals” in Roman Library
Seales grew up in what he calls “a very strong and devout
Christian tradition.” He wants as much ancient knowledge translated as soon as
possible, but his deepest hope is to find early Christian writings.
“My passion is more on religious material from the era,
because the first century was the cradle of Christianity, a phenomenal point in
human history.
“This villa gives absolutely no indication there would be
Christian material there, but, you know, you walk into any library, and you
pick a book randomly off the shelf. How do you know what you might get?” he
asks.
Seales hopes Piso’s library had a new-readings section.
“That’s where the Christian stuff might be, because it was the philosophy of
the day,” he says. “It would blow people’s minds. It would challenge us.”
Regardless of what is found, classicist Janko, who serves
as a Vesuvius Challenge judge, hopes more scrolls are dug up soon.
“Several times since the eruption in AD 79, this particular
spot has been covered with molten lava,” he says. “Vesuvius is quiet for now,
but experience teaches that it’s never quiet indefinitely.”
Seales believes that if the race against time to recover
all the scrolls is successful, the knowledge contained in the entire collection
will constitute the largest discovery from the ancient world to date. •
Originally
published in On Wisconsin, the alumni magazine of the
University of Wisconsin-Madison.
