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  • Monday, January 27, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion, on the sixth floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library


We welcome W. Brent Seales (University of Kentucky), for a talk titled: “On Virtually Unwrapping the Herculaneum Scrolls.” Professor Seales writes:

The Herculaneum papyrus scrolls, buried and carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE and then excavated in the eighteenth century, are original classical texts from the shelves of the only library to have survived from antiquity, but the intact scrolls have presented an enigmatic challenge: preserved by the fury of Vesuvius, they were nevertheless lost. The 250-year history of science and technology applied to the challenge of opening and then reading the scrolls has heretofore created only a fragmentary, damaged window into their literary and philosophical secrets, and in 1999, with more than 400 scrolls still unopened, attempts at physical unwrapping were permanently halted.  

This talk tells the story of the virtual unwrapping of the Herculaneum scrolls, some of the most difficult and iconic material in the world. Virtual unwrapping offers a  restoration pathway enabling us to read texts from objects that are too damaged even to be opened. Using a non-invasive approach, we have now shown how to recover the scrolls' contents, rendering them “unlost.” The path we have forged uses large-scale computing, 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 the texts of the Herculaneum scrolls for the first time in 2,000 years.

W. Brent Seales is the Stanley and Karen Pigman Chair of Heritage Science and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Kentucky. He is founder of the Heritage Science research lab (EduceLab) at the University of Kentucky, which applies techniques in machine learning and data science to the digital restoration of damaged materials, and 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).