Herculaneum Scrolls, The (2024)

[bunniefuu]

-Herculaneum -- an ancient Roman city frozen in time

by Mt. Vesuvius's eruption in the year AD

and yet perfectly preserved.

Of the many treasures uncovered here,

the most valuable aren't made of gold, bronze, or marble.

-When they first found them,

they thought they were wooden sticks or something.

-What look like lumps of coal are actually papyrus scrolls,

containing writings from , years ago.

-What we have, for the first time ever,

is an ancient library.

-These scrolls could reveal new insights about the ancient past,

but no one has been able to read them.

When people have tried to unroll them, they crumbled to dust.

Now, one man is on an extraordinary mission

to make this inaccessible library available again.

-I want to be able to read

what's inside a Herculaneum scroll

without having to open it.

-Brent Seales is giving us all hope.

-Cutting-edge science and technology

are being used to achieve this seemingly impossible task.

-How does one read a book or a scroll without ever opening it?

That's really the question.

-The scrolls were discovered in a vast

and stunning villa in the Bay of Naples...

...and have already revealed tantalizing clues

about the villa...

-I was shaking.

An unforgettable moment for me.

-...along with its owner, a man of extreme wealth

and political influence.

-To have a son-in-law like Julius Caesar --

that gave Piso a very, very strong political connection.

-What other stories are held

within Herculaneum's hidden library?

-It turned out to be harder than we even imagined.

-These are...

♪♪

In the year AD, on the Adriatic Coast of Italy,

Mt. Vesuvius erupted...

[ Rumbling ]

♪♪

...with a force , times more powerful

than an atomic b*mb.

Thousands of people either suffocated in ash clouds

or were overwhelmed by superheated gas.

♪♪

But from this terrible destruction

came remarkable preservation.

Roughly , years later,

the landscape surrounding Vesuvius

is now a spectacular time capsule of the glory days

of the Roman Empire.

Despite its violence, the eruption froze the area in time.

The ash that spewed out of Vesuvius blanketed

and buried nearby settlements, like the famous site of Pompeii.

Beneath feet of ash,

the city was protected from most of the forces of decay --

water, climate, and even vandalism.

But down the road from Pompeii lie the remains of a smaller

and even better-preserved Roman city, Herculaneum.

Herculaneum suffered a different fate.

A series of superheated avalanches of gas, ash,

and rock -- known as pyroclastic flows -- slammed into the city

like a runaway train.

After the eruption,

the settlement was buried under feet of volcanic mud.

Once the mud hardened, Herculaneum was sealed inside,

protecting everything from the effects of time.

Even organic material like food and wood survived.

Much of Herculaneum remains unexcavated

beneath the modern town of Ercolano.

But the condition of what has been found --

frescoes, mosaics, and statues -- is unparalleled.

But of all the treasures uncovered in Herculaneum,

these are the greatest --

hundreds of handwritten scrolls,

made from an ancient form of paper called papyrus,

that could contain countless insights into the Roman Empire.

These papyri represent one

of the most significant archeological finds

in history -- the remnants of the only library

to survive from the ancient world.

In addition to burying the papyri,

the searing -degree heat from Vesuvius's pyroclastic flow

instantly sucked oxygen from the air

and moisture from the scrolls,

turning them into lumps of charcoal.

Incredibly, this carbonization preserved the scrolls...

but created other problems for the future.

For the majority of scrolls,

the heat fused the rolled layers together,

making it impossible to open them up

without their crumbling to dust.

And so, most of the words within these incredibly fragile papyri

have remained unread for , years.

It's been impossible to find out what's written inside.

♪♪

But one person wants to change that.

It's a daunting mission,

and the man attempting to reveal the secrets

of the Herculaneum scrolls isn't an archaeologist.

-My name is Brent Seales.

I'm a professor of computer science

at the University of Kentucky.

I want to be able to read what's inside a Herculaneum scroll

without having to open it.

For a computer scientist to end up stumbling

into a world-class archeological site,

and then to think about reading material from a library,

that was a big leap for me.

-Brent first came to Herculaneum years ago

and learned about the remarkable papyrus scrolls then.

-And then it was after that

I became sort of hooked on the idea

of being able to read that material.

-Brent theorizes that,

with the help of advanced scanning techniques

and artificial intelligence,

he can read the scrolls digitally

without ever having to physically unroll them.

It sounds impossible.

-We wanted to do this work

not because we thought it would be easy,

but because we thought it would be a tremendous breakthrough

in our ability to read what was there.

It turned out to be harder than we even imagined.

-But success could mean new insight

into ancient Greece and Rome

or information not even considered.

David Sider is a scholar of ancient literature.

-I became a classicist in the first place

from Penguin Classics.

I read them, I loved Homer and I loved a lot of things.

It's simply great literature.

-Also a leading expert on the Herculaneum scrolls,

David sees Brent's work as a potential game-changer.

The ability to read the scrolls

offers a chance to understand the classical world

better than ever before.

-What we have, for the first time ever,

is an ancient library with literary texts.

So, anything new is obviously exciting.

-Classicists and historians

know there are ancient texts that exist

but have never been found.

-We know of many, many works that we do not have.

The Greeks made lists of things.

-In fact, it has been estimated

that well over % of all ancient texts have been lost.

Most of historian Livy's monumental "History of Rome"

is missing, along with two-thirds of the work

from the great philosopher Aristotle.

With so much missing,

scholars and historians are left studying scraps.

And much of our understanding of the past --

how people lived and what they thought -- remains fragmentary.

So, can Brent be the one

who finally shares what hasn't been seen for , years?

-I'm a pretty tenacious guy. It's the biggest challenge,

and it also stands to be the biggest impact

that I could ever have.

♪♪

-What's known about where the scrolls were found?

Who collected this library?

And what could it reveal about the dramas of the Roman world?

The remains of a private villa, built in the first century BC,

lie on the edge of Herculaneum.

Compared with much of modern-day Ercolano,

it's not the most striking place.

The villa appears rather ordinary.

But what once stood here was, quite simply,

one of the most magnificent private estates

of the Roman world.

The Villa of the Papyri occupied an -foot stretch

of stunning real estate.

Spread across almost five acres, looking down to the sea,

arranged around pillared courtyards and lavish gardens,

it was the finest luxury retreat in a part

of the world bursting with opulent homes.

♪♪

-The Bay of Naples was a very fashionable place to be.

Lots of rich elites had villas there.

Later, it's going to become what's popularly called

the playground of the emperors.

-The Villa of the Papyri stood out

even in an area renowned for its high-class homes.

♪♪

It was filled with lavish decorations -- striking mosaics

and wall paintings in the latest styles.

-It is extraordinary for its collection of sculptures,

as well.

So, there are various different forms of artwork

that also survive.

-The villa contained the largest collection of ancient statues

ever found in one place.

Works of fine art, some brought all the way from Greece,

suggest the villa's owners appreciated cultural treasures

and had the money to acquire them.

And alongside the statues,

busts, and frescoes stood a vast library of papyrus scrolls,

containing both Latin and ancient Greek writing.

This vast villa and the treasure trove of scrolls

within it was first discovered in .

Today, Brent Seales is going inside the Villa of the Papyri

for the first time...

and meeting with the perfect person to show him around.

Professor Mantha Zarmakoupi

is the world's leading expert on the Villa of the Papyri.

She knows the site better than anyone.

-We are at the Villa of the Papyri,

at the atrium quarter of the villa.

It's the nature of archeological sites

that we see them as open and deserted,

but at that time, you have these rooms fanning out

towards the landscape.

Wonderful view of the seascape beyond.

-The vast majority of the villa remains unexcavated,

beneath the modern town,

buried under feet of volcanic mud and ash.

Mantha has agreed to share her expertise with Brent

and show him where the scrolls were first unearthed,

guiding him through dark tunnels full of history.

-So, the villa was discovered

in the th century through tunnels.

You can see a column here.

Another column here...

-Herculaneum and the villa were first uncovered accidentally.

In the th century,

farmers digging for wells

began to unearth ancient Roman artifacts.

Once it became apparent

that a major settlement might be buried here,

excavators began digging tunnels deep into the volcanic rock

to find exactly what lay beneath the surface.

It was dangerous work.

-It was a very difficult operation.

So, they made as much effort to create stability in the space

that they were working.

Even the most recent excavations of workers were very much,

you know, concerned about the stability of the area,

and they were not happy to be working in the tunnels.

-Identifying the villa's foundations

allowed its shape and size to be mapped out.

Precious artifacts were found throughout this mapping process.

And then the excavators came across a trail

of charred papyri.

-When they first found them,

they didn't understand what the value was.

They didn't understand what they were.

They thought they were just like, you know,

wooden sticks or something.

-Some of the papyri appeared to have been discarded

by the people who found them,

or even burnt as fuel,

before ancient lettering was spotted on some

of the fragments.

-The rolls that were found there, for the large part,

were in a room

that the Roman architectural historians call the tablinum.

It's kind of between two open areas.

-The tablinum was similar to a study or home office,

where the villa's owner likely read his books.

Many of the scrolls were found lying in piles

or packed into crates,

not carefully sorted on shelves,

almost as if someone attempted to move them to safety.

Scattered scrolls led back to another area in the home,

where more papyri were found neatly organized.

-This is the room that has been associated

with the library of the villa.

This is where, you know, most of the scrolls were found stacked.

-This tunnel leads up to an area that remains unexcavated.

It's possible there could be hundreds more scrolls

waiting to be found.

Some years later,

Brent hopes he can use advanced technology

to make his own discoveries.

-What we have are the scrolls,

but we don't really know what the text is.

It feels like a real rescue, doesn't it?

When you see the context, right, where it was found?

It's sort of a miracle

that they survived and were discovered.

-Who built this villa and put together the library within?

Evidence suggests someone with immense power and influence.

A prominent Roman nobleman named...

-Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus.

He was a member of a family

that had been a very prominent political family in Rome.

-We have his name on inscriptions

found in Herculaneum.

He's the most powerful Roman we know of who was there.

And the richer you were, the larger your villa.

This villa is the biggest villa there.

We put two and two together.

Everyone is -- seems happy enough

to believe that it was his.

-Piso was a leading politician from a rich Roman family,

savvy enough to use his influence to benefit

his family and himself.

He managed to marry his daughter Calpurnia

off to prominent Roman general and statesman, Julius Caesar.

-That gave Piso a very, very strong political connection.

To have a son-in-law like Julius Caesar

in this period gave him a certain amount

of political influence and protection as well.

He got to the top in BCE

and became consul in Rome,

so that's one of the chief political positions.

-The statues excavated from the villa

are now housed at the National Archeological Museum in Naples.

They demonstrate Piso's immense wealth,

coming as he did from old Roman money.

One of the bronze busts is of particular interest.

This is Piso's son, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Pontifex,

who would, most likely,

have inherited the estate after his father's death.

-This is a bust of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Pontifex.

What is interesting for us

to look is this highly realistic representation

of a person of the time.

It's not idealized in any fashion.

We see his bony cheeks are being represented, you know,

uh, quite realistic.

His nose, the expression of his mouth.

He has a specific haircut, very much of the period.

-The bust was found in the tablinum,

where many of the scrolls were also discovered.

Sources suggest that Pontifex, like his father,

loved the finer things in life --

art, literature, and power.

-Pontifex was someone

who also managed to make quite a distinguished career for himself

in politics in Rome.

He was quite close with two emperors, Augustus and Tiberius.

So, he was able to go about his life

quite successfully in political terms.

-The emperor Tiberius, who ruled Rome from to AD,

is known to have spent time in the Bay of Naples.

It's possible Pontifex entertained him

at the Villa of the Papyri,

showing off the statues in the gardens

and the fine works of literature in the library.

Today, scholars believe that,

in addition to works of philosophy and literature,

the papyri could also contain information

about important events happening in Imperial Rome,

which makes the possibility of finding out

what they say even more critical.

The ability to read the scrolls

won't just rescue long-lost works of literature,

but also start a new chapter of understanding

of a crucial era in history.

That is Brent Seales' mission.

-I'm an imaging specialist,

and I always felt it was my mission

to use those technologies, imaging in general,

to solve new problems.

And ultimately,

I fantasized about the idea of something completely closed up,

that couldn't be opened at all,

and that there might be a way to see inside.

-Brent believes that his imaging techniques hold the key

to reading the papyri.

But just getting access to the scrolls has been challenging.

The vast majority are kept under lock and key in Naples.

Brent's first attempt to gain access didn't go so well.

-I talked to conservators

who essentially said I would never be given the permission

to do anything with that material

because it was too fragile.

-But Brent wasn't deterred.

And in ,

after his imaging techniques started to show promise,

he gained an important ally.

♪♪

♪♪

The Institut de France in Paris

is one of only two places outside Italy

to house Herculaneum scrolls.

They arrived in France at the start of the th century.

Now, more than years later,

the staff here are responsible for protecting

these precious items.

Sharing Brent's desire to unlock the mysteries of these papyri,

Francoise Bérard has agreed to grant him access

to the Institut's scrolls.

There is enormous risk.

Brent and his team have developed an ingenious method

to ensure the scrolls are transported

as safely as possible.

-What we are seeing here are replica models

of exact Herculaneum scrolls,

which are incredibly important

for us to be able to build the cases

that we use to transport them.

-Using a process called photogrammetry,

the scientists have created extremely detailed replicas

that are then used as molds to build cases for the scrolls.

Seth Parker has led this part of the project.

-We took many photographs of the scroll,

and we reconstructed this D shape from those photographs.

This particular model was made from a CT scan we did in ,

which gave us an exact form fit for the outside surface.

What's very important about that is it gives us the exact shape,

and we can create a model for a case

that's form fitted to all of the complex structure

that you see on the outside of this scroll.

We designed this case

so that the scroll could be mounted in the case

in a horizontal position,

and the conservators wouldn't have to feel

as though they're ever putting the scroll

in any sort of a precarious position.

♪♪

-The specially designed transportation cases

have been given to the staff at the Institut de France,

so the real scrolls can be placed inside.

♪♪

But this is delicate and precise work, even for the experts.

♪♪

♪♪

Finally safe and protected,

the scrolls are taken miles away --

from Paris to Oxfordshire in the United Kingdom --

where Brent is waiting,

ready to attempt the seemingly impossible.

-How does one read a book or a scroll without ever opening it?

That's really the question.

-At Diamond Light Source, the UK's national synchrotron,

Brent is hoping he has found a scanning facility

to help him achieve his goal.

-So, at the moment, we are inside the control room

of the Diamond Light Source.

This is a big machine, one of the large-scale facilities

in which we accelerate electrons very close

to the speed of light.

And we produce electromagnetic radiation --

very intense photon beams -- to essentially enable research

in a number of areas.

-This facility can produce a concentrated light source

of extraordinary intensity.

-So, to give you an idea,

I mean, this is billions of times brighter than the sun.

- billion times brighter, in fact.

Using this photon beam

to generate extremely high-resolution X-rays

of the scrolls is a crucial first step in trying

to read what's inside.

-You're shining an X-ray beam,

a very intense X-ray beam, to your object.

It works very similarly to a CT scanner.

-Brent's theory is that the ink inside the scrolls

should reflect more of the X-rays than the paper,

allowing him to see a contrast between the ink and the papyrus.

It's a process he's successfully used in the past

to read other ancient texts.

In ,

he was able to read a ,-year-old carbonized scroll

found near Ein Gedi in Israel.

-We were the first to ever have done that.

The scroll from Ein Gedi was a --

a verifiable copy of the first two chapters of Leviticus.

And it was verified by scholars outside my group --

biblical scholars -- so fully vetted.

-Reading inside of the Ein Gedi scroll was a major breakthrough.

But the Herculaneum papyri are an even greater challenge.

-The scroll from Ein Gedi must have had some metal or impurity

in the ink that helped us with the contrast

because it turned out

that the writing came directly from the scan.

What we're finding with Herculaneum

is that we don't get a direct signal at the ink in the scan.

It has to do with the chemistry.

In the ancient world,

the inks were mainly based on carbon,

and the papyrus is carbon.

So, it's kind of hard to see the difference

between the background and the foreground.

These came from Paris yesterday.

-Yes. -On the, uh...

On the TGV, through the tunnel, right, through the...

uh, the English Channel.

-Francoise Bérard has brought loose fragments of papyrus

from the Paris collection,

in addition to the Herculaneum papyrus.

They will provide a crucial building block

for reading inside the scrolls.

Brent has used his expertise as a computer scientist

to build a deep-learning artificial-intelligence program

to identify where there is ink on the papyrus.

Because the loose fragments contain ink

that is visible to the naked eye,

they will provide Brent with a sample

that can be easily checked to see if the AI is working.

-What we're doing when we image the fragments is

we're creating a -- a scientific control.

Because in the data we capture,

we can see what that data looks like,

and hopefully tease out what ink actually should be looking like.

-It's okay?

-Yeah. Let me, um...

let me cinch it up with the Allen wrench.

So, we'll do this...

Once we use those controls,

we have a better sense of what to look for in the data.

So that's where the artificial intelligence comes in.

We've trained a system

to be able to see really subtle changes,

to go through the data systematically and say,

"Does that section look like it has ink?

Yes or no?"

It creates for us sort of an amplification.

And the training comes from these open fragments.

Because by being able to see what's visible,

we can make this comparison, uh, to what's invisible and hidden.

-Once the fragments have been scanned, it's time

for the intact scroll to receive the same treatment.

-Of course, there's this sacred kind of feeling

that comes over you when you're in the presence of something

that's , years old.

♪♪

If we scan the scroll,

we can tell what the shape is and how long it might have been.

-The Herculaneum scrolls were carbonized

in their rolled state,

but they were also bent out of shape

by the heat of Vesuvius and their burial underground,

making Brent's job even harder.

-It's not a perfect cylinder like you envision in your mind

when you think of someone reading a scroll.

They're completely unpredictable in -- in their shape.

Now they are spiral-like, but every twist and turn,

every break, is chaos inside.

-Scanning that captures the internal structure

of the papyrus, its every fold and crease, is vital.

[ Alarm blaring ]

♪♪

The intense stream of X-rays

will build an astonishingly high-resolution D image

of the inside of the scroll.

-To get a complete scan of the whole scroll,

I think it would take eight hours.

Um, and then that's about individual scans

that we have to piece together.

-The scans seem to have been a success,

producing hundreds of terabytes of data.

Brent and his team must assemble and analyze this information

in order to have any hope of reading the scrolls.

-This is the biggest technical challenge in my career.

I've learned to just embrace the fact

that those challenges make it interesting.

I have confidence

that what I'm doing will be a major step forward.

-The kind of papyrus scrolls found at Herculaneum

were already an ancient technology.

The Egyptians began using the papyrus plant

to make paper some , years earlier.

But the "books" produced from papyrus

weren't like modern books.

-"Books," you have to understand,

this is a nice generic term.

When you talk about a book of Plato,

you're using the translation of the Greek word "biblion,"

which means a roll -- physically a roll.

-Today's books are a bound volume of pages.

But the Romans would glue numerous sheets of papyrus

together, end to end, to make one continuous sheet.

They could easily reach feet long.

-The papyrus begins to be stretched out longer and longer,

longer than the arms can reach.

And so, the obvious thing to do is you just roll it up,

and then you get the -- the scroll.

Not too many years ago,

when everyone was seeing movies at home on VHS tape,

and you would rent it from Blockbuster

or some firm like that, and they slapped on a label,

"Be kind, rewind."

And that was the unspoken etiquette in the ancient world.

When you got to the end of the text,

if you would only be so kind as to re-roll it to the beginning,

so the next person can start at the beginning.

-People have been desperate to know what the scrolls' text says

since faint writing was first spotted on them.

But up until now, every effort to look inside

risked causing catastrophic damage.

Crude attempts to open the scrolls,

like slicing them in half,

resulted in many papyri being destroyed.

Elaborate machines were designed to unravel them inch by inch,

allowing scholars to see, and in some cases even identify,

tiny fragments of writing.

-The best-preserved parts of a roll is at the end.

And the result is,

although we have only the ends of many works

from Herculaneum, we can know what we have.

-What have the ends of scrolls already revealed?

And what do those texts say about Piso,

likely first owner of the Villa of the Papyri

and its library?

Epicureanism takes its name

from the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus,

who died in the rd century BC.

A bust of him stood in the reading room

of the Villa of the Papyri.

-Some material by Epicurus himself

and others by followers of him.

It was a philosophy of moderation.

-A variety of philosophies and belief systems fell out of favor

and eventually disappeared

when Rome adopted Christianity as its official religion...

...including Epicureanism.

But from the small number of legible fragments

from the Herculaneum scrolls,

a few things are known about Epicureanism.

-We've all learned more about Epicurus, thanks to the library.

And every new scrap that comes out of it is -- is important.

-Piso's library shows his keen interest in this philosophy.

And evidence has shown he was friends

with an Epicurean philosopher -- a Syrian-Greek named Philodemus,

who spent time with him at the villa.

-Quite clearly, Philodemus was attracted to Epicureanism.

And he began to gather the books.

There's excellent reason to believe that the library

that we found in Herculaneum

was in origin Philodemus's working library.

-At some point, it seems Philodemus's collection,

and his own writings,

made their way to the villa, perhaps as a gift to Piso.

And these works may help solve a major mystery surrounding Piso.

In BC, Piso was at the top

of Rome's political scene --

consul and Caesar's father-in-law.

But soon after, Rome was gripped by political chaos and violence.

Caesar seized power as a dictator,

was assassinated, and civil w*r ensued.

♪♪

The instability ended when Caesar's nephew Octavius

became the first emperor, Augustus.

But by this point,

Piso has disappeared from the historical record.

-He seems to fall out of the literary record

in around BCE.

-Which was about years before the eruption of Vesuvius.

One theory is that Piso died around this time.

But it is possible that his Epicureanism --

which encouraged freedom from worldly troubles --

led him away from politics to retirement

at his magnificent villa in Herculaneum.

The Villa of the Papyri would have given Piso

and his friend Philodemus the perfect place

to experience otium -- leisure, relaxing,

and reading from the library they put together.

-Epicureanism could be somewhat facetiously called a philosophy

of relaxing, but they called it happiness.

-No record stating when Piso died exists.

But the villa and its library remained standing

for at least a century after.

Was his collection of scrolls left untouched

until Vesuvius erupted?

A recent discovery suggests otherwise.

Valeria Piano is a researcher in classical philosophy

at the University of Florence.

A few years ago, she was studying fragments

from one particular Herculaneum scroll

at the National Library of Naples,

trying to identify its author.

But much of the writing was so faded and damaged,

it wasn't visible.

-Even if they are unrolled, some parts of them couldn't be read.

So, technology is essential.

In order to read a carbonized papyrus,

you have to usually join two kinds of methodologies.

The first essential one is to directly read it

by using a microscope

and using the right angle of visible light.

And then, the second crucial methodology

is studying the digital images

that are produced usually by infrared spectrum.

-The Latin scroll Valeria studied

had previously been logged as a record of a political speech.

♪♪

But after meticulously studying the text,

she spotted a key phrase

that convinced her this was actually an important lost book.

-The sentence was...

"...from the beginning of the Civil w*r."

-For Valeria, this short phrase had huge significance.

The Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger,

in his own works,

had used this exact sentence to refer to a history

of the Roman civil w*r composed by his father, Seneca the Elder.

-We best know Seneca the Elder as a historian.

He wrote a history of his own time,

from the time of the civil wars.

Certainly, he was also interested in cataloguing

the political events that were taking place in Rome.

-Scholars believed that Seneca the Elder's history of Rome

had long been lost forever.

But Valeria now thought that the fragments

she was looking at could contain writings from this missing work.

All she needed was proof.

And then, at the very end of the text,

she found what she was looking for.

-His name, Seneca the Elder,

is partially readable at the very end of the papyrus.

I was, like, shaking.

That was really an unforgettable moment for -- for me.

♪♪

-Valeria's discovery suggests there are

many more important texts still to be found.

It also reveals more of the Villa of the Papyri's story.

Based on what is known,

Piso's son Pontifex was likely the villa's last owner.

He died in the year -- years before the eruption.

But Seneca the Elder's history is believed

to have been published in the year ...

which means that this work must have been added

to the villa's library after Pontifex's death.

This is exciting news.

The villa's library was clearly being added to

until its destruction.

Mantha believes one particular room proves this was the case.

-So, we're in the subterranean structures of, uh, the villa.

This is one of the new rooms excavated

during the new excavations of the 's.

-This opulent room,

only uncovered at the end of the th century,

was found on a lower level of the villa, beneath the atrium.

It likely looked out over the beach.

From just its beautiful wall paintings,

Mantha has deduced much about the life of the villa.

-This ceiling, we think that this belongs to the early,

like the third quarter of the st century BC.

And the lower part is done in a later decoration

that we will think is around

the beginning of the st century CE --

later, at a later phase of the villa.

It tells that this house didn't have

a single owner -- ownership passed from one to the other.

They value the old decoration,

but they're, you know, renewing it.

A newer taste that brings into focus the villa tradition

of which they're a part.

So, it tells us that the villa had a long life.

-During the later stages of the villa's long life,

around the year AD,

there was a series of severe earthquakes that caused

widespread devastation across the Bay of Naples.

♪♪

Their effects are still visible in the remains at Herculaneum.

But there is evidence that the villa was being repaired

and redecorated after this disaster.

-So, we can see here, the ceiling there being restored.

And so basically this part of the ceiling,

where the side of my finger is,

that has been left unfinished there.

-It seems a restoration of the ceilings

was taking place after the earthquake of .

It is unfinished,

probably because of the eruption of Vesuvius in .

The Romans didn't know

that an earthquake often signals another disaster still to come.

This repair work suggests the estate was carefully maintained

up until Vesuvius erupted.

It's possible that the villa was still owned

by Piso and Pontifex's descendants

until its last moments.

♪♪

♪♪

When Vesuvius did finally erupt,

there was nothing anyone could do to save the villa.

However, it seems people tried to save its precious contents.

-It was bedlam as it was erupting,

and people were leaving and they were taking things

and leaving other things.

-During the villa's excavation,

several papyri were found scattered like a trail,

leading away from the library.

Many were piled up either in the tablinum

or outside in the back garden.

Experts believe someone was trying to save the scrolls.

-The question is, in the time remaining,

did people value the books so much

that along with their relatives and some food

and maybe some clothing, who knows,

did they also take the scrolls?

You know, like the scene in "The Godfather" where he says,

"Leave the g*n, take the cannoli."

Was it a case of, leave the Philodemus, take the Virgil?

-The cruel irony is that any scrolls

the villa's residents took with them were lost forever.

Only the ones that remained inside its walls were preserved.

No human remains have been uncovered at the villa.

Many people in the city of Herculaneum

rushed to nearby boatsheds, in hopes of evacuating by sea.

But the speed and fury of the superheated volcanic avalanche

wiped out everything in its path,

entombing the Villa of the Papyri

and everyone still in Herculaneum.

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

[ Birds chirping ]

-Maybe struggle's just part of the story

because if you look at the material,

tell me that the material is not struggling.

I mean, it's been carbonized for , years,

and pulled from the ground years ago,

and now here we are still struggling

to just sort of redeem it and reconcile it.

I think that's just a major theme in this story.

-It's been four long, tough years since Brent

and his team scanned the Herculaneum scroll from Paris.

Today, they can finally see the results...

and they are spectacular.

-You can see the wraps of the scroll,

with the core in the middle spiraling outward.

Of course, it's very complicated.

So, here we have one slice.

And if you take that slice

and then stack another one on top of it

and just keep doing that,

you can start to get a sense for the D structure

that these scrolls have inside.

-The vast amount of data collected from the scans

of the scroll has been transformed into these

remarkably detailed models -- a perfect digital re-creation

of the inside of the carbonized papyrus.

-Well, of course, we have this complicated D structure.

How do we find the ink in it? That's the big question.

So, what we do is we actually just focus on one portion --

one part of a wrap that you can clearly identify,

either in the slice images or in D as we're looking at here.

And once you find that wrap, you focus on it

and trace its shape and extract it

and only look at the data relating to that shape.

Each of these colored lines represent a single layer

or part of a layer from the wraps of the scroll

that we've identified and pulled out, uh, on its own.

-This process is called segmentation --

isolating an individual layer within the scroll,

to locate the ink on that part of the scroll.

Brent's team has attempted to train an AI algorithm

to identify any writing inside.

Have they accomplished this seemingly impossible task?

Can anything be seen on this layer of the scroll?

Brent boldly decided to make his software open source,

creating a worldwide team to help process

the many terabytes of data.

-There's been a lot of collaboration and sharing,

which has been great.

In fact, we've set up a competitive science environment

that has inspired, uh, people around the world

to contribute to this project.

So, there's a global community now talking about this work.

And by global, I mean thousands of people,

not tens or hundreds -- thousands of people

talking about this work.

-This is what two decades of work

has been leading toward for Brent...

a moment some said would never come.

-This seems like a moonshot,

you know, reading a scroll from Herculaneum without opening it.

There were so many things

that I was told we would not be able to do.

We couldn't get access.

We couldn't move anything to a different place.

The technology wouldn't work.

It's been very real that we might not achieve our goals.

Now that I look back on it after years' worth

of aggregation and accumulation of results,

it actually is kind of astounding to realize

that all those people who said that we couldn't do

all those things were wrong.

They were wrong.

♪♪

What you're seeing behind me is the first-ever set of text

from inside a closed Herculaneum scroll.

This is the first time

that anyone has seen this text in , years.

What I'm now seeing is actually the thing

that I've been looking for.

It's incredibly exciting.

-But what does it say?

Brent's friend, papyrologist James Brusuelas,

is helping him parse this lost text.

-The last time a human looked at this was an ancient Roman.

-But you're saying there's a word there?

-The word "porphura" or "porphuras"

starts to become very clear, and that's a word for "purple."

-So, you're saying that the first thing

that we pull out of Herculaneum, that we can read,

it -- it says purple?

-Yeah. It's a very specific word in the ancient world.

When you make purple clothes and you wear purple clothes,

it means you're very wealthy.

It's like driving around in your Ferrari.

This is why the Roman emperors often wore purple.

So, in this instance, if it's not matching anything

that we've already seen from what's been published

from Herculaneum, it could be something unknown.

-This is from a scroll that's completely closed.

If we can get a little bit farther,

we can give you images that look like something

that's already opened.

-We're gonna be knocking at your door,

"Can you give me more segments? Can you give me more segments?

I want more lines, more lines, more lines, more lines."

It's a watershed moment, really.

-An achievement of a lifetime for Brent and his team.

But there is still much to be done.

He wants to continue analyzing the scrolls

and inspire a new generation to join him

for the next phase of this adventure.

-This is a breakthrough moment, and it won't be the last.

Now we're at the place where I think people are --

are cheering for us, actually.

-Brent Seales is giving us all hope.

He's not a classicist by training.

He somehow got caught up with it.

He's our savior from without.

I mean, he's doing things that we never thought possible.

-The plan is to inspire more excavation,

because I believe that there may be more of this material

actually still in the ground.

We've opened a door here for you

to join us in an expedition

that we've been working on for , years now.

We're at a summit, we're enjoying the breakthrough.

Beyond archeology,

beyond the next computer algorithm,

beyond artificial intelligence.

We have actual intelligence from , years ago.

For me, there's this immense joy

at knowing we're gonna read this literature

and we're gonna find out what it says.

It's a new beginning.