Abstract
The Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples and the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris have quite rightly renounced any further invasive attempts to open the unopened charred scrolls from Herculaneum. Yet there are still several hundred such volumina in Naples and three in France !
At the end of 2013, two of the six carbonized scrolls from Paris, P.Herc.Paris.3 and 4, were scanned at the powerful Synchrotron in Grenoble by a Franco-Italian team, with very interesting results. For the first time, a series of more or less distinct, aligned letters could be seen inside a closed scroll, without damaging it. For his part, virtual imaging specialist Prof. Brent Seales (Lexington University, Kentucky) had been busy for several years perfecting a complex procedure for virtually unrolling these same synchrotron-scanned scrolls, hoping eventually to detect the carbonized ink on the papyrus' charred turns. As the ink remained invisible on the flattened scroll fibers, he decided to launch the " Vesuvius challenge " in March 2023, in the hope that AI would be able to reveal the ink on Paris papyrus no. 4, virtually unrolled by his team. It was as part of this challenge that, during the winter of 2023-2024, three young AI specialists succeeded in making visible the final 15 half-columns of this scroll preserved intact, thus initiating a real revolution in Herculaneum papyrology.
But this technological feat should not blind us to the fact that its primary purpose is to contribute to the recovery and transmission of the thought of ancient authors, and more specifically of Greek philosophers, since the books in question are unknown to the manuscript tradition and belonged to the Epicurean school of Campania : among their authors were Epicurus and several of his disciples, including Metrodorus of Lampsaka and Philodemus of Gadara, a friend of Cicero. Deciphering books over 2,000 years old using the latest sophisticated techniques is the new challenge of Herculaneum papyrology...
