A 21-year-old computer student has earned $40,000 for deciphering the first word in an ancient scroll (Picture: Vesuvius Challenge)

For almost 2,000 years, no one has been able to read a word from ancient scrolls buried during the eruption of Vesuvius – until now.

That first word is purple.

Or porphyras to be precise, but purple in English.

The ancient text hails from the Herculaneum papyri, a collection of 1,800 scrolls buried during the deadly eruption of Vesuvius in 79CE, which wiped out the city of Pompeii.

The nearby town of Herculaneum was smothered in a layer of ash 20 metres thick, preserving many of its secrets from the time of the disaster.

However, after almost 2,000 years, the scrolls are too fragile to unfurl – although early researchers did try, destroying some of them in the process. Researchers say they represent the perfect storm of important content, massive damage, extreme fragility, and difficult-to-detect ink. 

One of the Herculaneum papyri, buried during the eruption of Vesuvius (Picture: Reuters)

To discover what they concealed, a team from the University of Kentucky teamed up with Oxfordshire-based science facility Diamond Light Force to scan a pair of the scrolls and four fragments in a bid to discover the words within.

The task has taken several years – University of Kentucky professor Bent Seales and his team began the scanning process in Oxford in 2019.

‘Diamond Light Source is an absolutely crucial element in our long-term plan to reveal the writing from damaged materials,’ said Professor Seales at the time. ‘It offers unparalleled brightness and control for the images we can create, plus access to a brain trust of scientists who understand our challenges and are eager to help us succeed.

‘Texts from the ancient world are rare and precious, and they simply cannot be revealed through any other known process.’

Professor Brent Seales with a fragment of one of the scrolls (Picture: AFP)

One of the main difficulties in deciphering the scrolls – apart from not being able to unroll them – is that the carbon-based ink used does not show up on X-rays, unlike metal-based inks. However, new technology designed by Diamond Light Force enabled them to amplify the ink signal from within, bringing the text back to life.

The next challenge was to decipher what the writing actually meant, and for that, the team took the scrolls public, setting up the Vesuvius Challenge and offering $40,000 to the first person to identify 10 letters in a 4cm squared area of the scroll.

A tiny fragment of one of the scrolls (Picture: AFP)

That prize went to 21-year-old computer science student Luke Farritor, who became the first person in almost two millennia to read the scrolls after finding the words ‘purple dye’.

Soon after, biorobotics graduate student Youssef Nader made the same discovery with even clearer results, earning himself an additional $10,000 prize.

The scrolls were excavated in 1752 during excavation of the town, and were found in a villa belonging to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law.

The majority of the 1,800 scrolls reside at the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, although a few were offered as gifts to dignitaries by the King of Naples and wound up at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, the British Library, and the Institut de France.

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The scrolls are an ancient mystery.