Original subtitles

(eerie music)

What does it mean to be lost to history?

The ancient Roman town of Herculaneum

essentially disappeared in the year 79 AD,

buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius,

destroyed by a pyroclastic surge of super hot gases

between 400 and 900 degrees Fahrenheit

moving nearly 200 miles per hour.

The searing heat boiled the blood,

and vaporized the flesh of its victims.

Burned all in its path, leaving behind a charred city

beneath layer upon layer of ash and volcanic debris.

But emerging new technologies push scientific boundaries

to recover and restore archeological artifacts.

Taken together, advances in X-ray imaging,

data science, and artificial intelligence

may soon delicately and digitally unravel history

and reveal ancient texts

dating a few years before the height of the Roman empire.

(dramatic music)

Computer scientist and University of Kentucky

professor Brent Seales is at the forefront of these efforts.

Augmented reality is supposed to be presenting you

with a view of your actual environment.

There's no question that in the world of ancient material,

this technology is gonna help us break through and read

materials that have never been read before.

Like the Herculaneum scrolls,

papyrus manuscripts flash fried by Vesuvius 2,000 years ago,

left carbonized and sealed shut.

Mysterious Roman time capsules

that currently drive the professor's curiosity.

They are the canonical example of material

from antiquity that is both too fragile to open,

and also so valuable and mysterious

that it has captured the attention

of scholars for many years.

Seales and his team

at the Digital Restoration Initiative,

part of the university's College of Engineering

have pioneered archeological applications

for technologies originally designed for medical study.

Specifically, micro-computed 3D tomography.

We're an imaginative people, right?

So we see that advance, and we say

now that I see how that works,

there are applications that maybe no one's thought of

that can cause breakthroughs in other areas,

and that imagination right,

and then that reapplication

is part and parcel of the innovative process.

And then how many slices do you have

to make up the whole run of the scroll?

I mean maybe 12,000? Right.

That's a lot of data, right?

And it's that imagination,

coupled with a surefire confidence in methodology,

which drives Seales to his most ambitious projects,

and ultimate successes.

Including the 2016 virtual unwrapping

of a third century Hebrew scroll

known as the Ein Gedi Scroll.

Using X-ray to peer inside the badly damaged

rolled up animal skin,

Seales and his team laid out

the artifact's geometric volume without ever opening it,

highlighting the text within.

(soothing music)

Now he's set his sights on the Herculaneum scrolls.

(gentle guitar music)

Back before the eruption, the Bay of Naples

offered a restful environment, just as it does now.

An ideal playground for the Roman elite and well-to-do.

(gentle guitar music)

California's Getty Villa is an architectural replica

of the Herculaneum Estate thought to be

the home of Caesar's father-in-law.

(gentle guitar music)

Kenneth Lapatin is the museum's curator of antiquities.

We know the Bay of Naples is where

Romans, senators, and later emperors left the city

in the heat of the summers

to much more pleasant climates in the south.

And in a way, I think it was

like the Hamptons in the United States.

(soothing music)

The nearby city of Pompeii

and its chilling body casts, death poses,

seemingly frozen in time

may haunt the public's mind.

But sitting at the base of Vesuvius,

the small town of Herculaneum

and the lavish estates surrounding it

were burned and buried as well.

(soothing music)

We know the wind was blowing south,

so the huge column of volcanic material

created an ash cloud, which was blown south

and the ash gently fell on Pompeii.

When that force of the volcano subsided

and the ash cloud dropped,

a very very hot, steamy, muddy volcanic gassy cloud

rolled down the hill at high speed

and burnt and buried Herculaneum

very differently than Pompeii,

burning and carbonizing

and thus preserving a lot of the finds.

So Herculaneum is smaller than Pompeii,

more deeply buried, and better preserved.

(metal tools clanging)

Largely forgotten, Herculaneum's ruins

were first discovered in the mid 18th Century

under 75 feet of compacted volcanic ash.

During the next 300 years, excavations started and stopped.

The town still lies mostly underground, and undisturbed.

One reason why what has been unearthed

is incredibly rare and treasured.

(soothing music)

And so the Getty Villa's 2019 summer exhibit,

Buried by Vesuvius, includes many priceless items

recovered from its ancient prototype.

Many on loan and transported out of Italy

for the first time ever.

Statues.

Frescoes.

And a few of those charred and scarred papyrus scrolls

by which the original site is now known, Villa de Papryi.

It's a small sample of an extraordinary find,

a library of some 1,800 relics.

There may be more as of yet un-excavated.

We understand that when they

first hit these papyrus scrolls,

they looked like charcoal briquettes.

No one knew what they were, and the story goes

that one of them was dropped and broke open,

and letters were found within, Greek writing,

and then they were recognized for what they are,

but they were carbonized and really frozen in a sense

by this volcanic debris,

so they can't just be easily unrolled.

Through the centuries, laborious efforts

to unfurl the fragile manuscripts often left scholars

an odd collection of puzzle pieces.

We could see a jigsaw puzzle in 3D,

because many of the fragments are also so-called

multi-layer fragments.

Fabrizio Diozzi leads the Department of Papyri

at the National Library of Naples,

holder of the vast majority of the scrolls.

The painstaking work to piece together the pieces

brought to light a library largely consisting of poetry

and epicurean philosophy detailing

the virtues of friendship and modest pleasures.

Writings never copied by Medieval and Muslim scribes,

and therefore hidden from scholarly interpretation.

(speaks foreign language)

It's a primary source.

We could say freshly thought, yeah?

This is a unique find.

This is the only library we have with its contents

from the ancient Greco-Roman world.

We have lots of library buildings,

but they're empty, they're just standing shells.

The scrolls are immensely valuable

in the sense that it's the only library from antiquity

that has ever been discovered in place.

All libraries from antiquity have been lost.

But in many respects,

it's an unreadable library

with some 400 to 500 scrolls still sealed shut.

Ancient texts and thought lost in plain sight.

What's really interesting about Herculaneum

is that it brings out your own

personal interests and expectations,

because it's mysterious and intriguing

and entirely open as to what

each one of those individual texts will be.

Determined to learn what lies within,

it was his earlier work with the Ein Gedi Scroll,

which excited those charged

with preserving and protecting Herculaneum's heritage,

and afforded Seales' a new scholarly partnership.

Yes when I saw this clip,

I think let's do with our scrolls.

And so Seales and his team partnered

with the UCLA School of Dentistry

to use the powerful and sensitive X-ray equipment on site

to scan those three scrolls

before installation at the Getty exhibit.

(suspenseful music)

For two of the samples, the team designed form fitting molds

to protect the actual antiquities.

This 3D printed model, which is just made out of plastic

helps us have the exact form and shape

so that this is a lot easier to do than

messing with the real sample, which is a lot more fragile.

Never this papryi were so touched

for so long time.

So far from home. Yeah.

It's everything new.

Yeah, so we have to be careful.

Okay so orientation's pretty important

because this is a form-fitted case

specifically for this shape, so

the real scroll has to be oriented, right,

in exactly this position

so that it'll go in there just as it should.

Are you ready?

Yes. Yes, go.

All right.

Okay.

(plucky music)

Yeah, very nice.

That's a perfect fit too, isn't it?

Perfecto.

Preservation takes priority

throughout the process.

Photo documentation at every step.

Okay you have what you need?

Soft sheets of Teflon

add an extra layer of cushion.

That's cool.

This is the trickiest part of the preparation

for the scanning because you really don't

want to cause any damage beyond just handling it normally.

And so the Teflon is like putting a baby to bed, you know?

With a blanket on the top and on the bottom you know?

You use that kind of care.

Just like you're dealing with a little child,

putting it to bed

in the little form-fitted case,

so that everybody is safe and sound

for the time that the scanner's gonna be running.

Oh very nice.

No pressure.

Awesome.

Very nice job, Luigi, thank you.

Very nice.

Okay, what do you think?

Yeah.

Pretty stable.

Yeah, looks great.

Rock solid.

Ready to go.

Once set, the computers take over,

performing its program, running more than 24 hours.

Set the parameters for that scan and kick it off.

This scanner's platform

rotates slower than the eye can see

in order to capture critical data from every angle.

Here's how it works.

The sample size of every individual point

of this data set we collect will be very, very small.

About the thickness of a strand of silk.

Even better than the size of a human hair.

We need that kind of resolution to be able

to see everything about the detail inside the scrolls.

What I'm seeing right now,

I mean these views are really lovely.

I mean we can see so much structure,

and you see these variations in density

and that's where the curiosity comes in.

You know, what's that, what's causing that?

That's really, really interesting.

(suspenseful music)

The data that we take through X-ray

gives us the platform to do all of the next steps

that allow us to open it up.

Those steps include finding where the layers

that are inside really are in that data.

We call that segmentation, and it just means that

we're finding the layers and modeling what they look like

so that we know exactly

what the shape is that we're dealing with.

That modeling step is actually not that easy

because the layers, you can imagine,

of a wrapped up scroll, or a book that's been crushed,

those layers and their shapes are completely unpredictable.

We don't know in advance what they're gonna look like

until we take the scan,

so we have a computer algorithm that we've built

to be able to find every one of those layers,

identify them, and then model them.

They've done this all before,

so they know understanding

the volume and layout is just the beginning.

Identifying text might be even more complex,

depending on the type of ink used.

In certain situations that's direct,

because the ink is made from iron or lead

and we can just see it.

In other situations, it's more subtle than that

because the ink has to be viewed as just a layer

of material that's very similar to what it's written on,

and so we have to find a way to go ahead

and do that amplification.

The X-ray can pinpoint microscopic shapes,

potential layers of ink,

but then artificial intelligence

will likely provide confirmation

based on a pre-determined reference.

The fact that the ink deposits in a layer

and you can measure the thickness of that layer.

The fact that the ink soaks into the fibers

of the material that you're writing on,

all of those physical phenomenon

end up being measurable by the imaging method

that we're using, and then we can put them together using AI

to amplify what we see with the naked eye.

It's not unlike learning how to do face recognition

by sampling a million different faces

and pointing out to the algorithm, okay that's a face,

that's a face, that's a face,

and then learning from those examples

what a face looks like in an unknown image.

In the case of the Herculaneum scrolls,

the fragments of scrolls damaged

by earlier attempts to unroll them will hopefully

provide Seales with that AI detail

to identify the ancient text.

So I think it's really ironic

and maybe poetically beautiful

that the sacrifice of those early scrolls

might provide the reference that we exactly need

to be able to read the ones that are still inaccessible.

So what we're doing here is we're looking at

the 140 gigabytes of data that we collected overnight.

What we've done here is taken over about 10,000 images,

10,000 radiographs that we're gonna use

to compute the internal structure of the scroll.

With just three days to work

with these incredible relics,

the team compiled a total of approximately

1.3 terabytes of data thanks to

a combined 164 hours in the scanners.

Algorithms will analyze the data sets,

but given the massive amount of data,

and Seales' detailed methodology,

it could take six months to a year

to reach and release any final results.

Well you know, my expectations are always different

from everyone else's.

I expect things to happen quickly,

but what's probably going to happen is that

we will not see the complete text right away

because there are too many computational steps involved

in being really deliberate and systematic about our work.

But when dealing with 2,000 year old documents,

what's a few months mean to learn the secrets held within?

The prospect of non-invasively,

virtually unwrapping these scrolls and reading their texts

is a very exciting breakthrough,

and scholars will potentially have access to a text

that's complete, that's whole, and undamaged.

If I could see one of our scrolls,

seeing the writings,

naturally I'd jump for joy.

What else?

Now that the digital data is collected,

a little patience won't dampen that enthusiasm

and technological promise.

So recognizing the ravages of time

on these ancient artifacts, the Naples National Library

has already expanded its partnership

with Seales and his team.

People take a look around and they say,

we might not have this material with us for always and ever.

(sirens blare)

Notre Dame can burn, and that threat

makes us reevaluate the urgency with which we want to treat

the valuable materials that we have.

In the end, this work

marks an evolution in archeology.

Unobtrusively building a modern library of ancient knowledge

without ever turning a page.

When the Herculaneum scrolls were discovered

250 years ago, we were in the Dark Ages of conservation.

We experimented with these materials.

We as a community, and some of them were destroyed.

I think that these new techniques for imaging

will give us more information than ever before

to transform how conservation is done

so that we don't make those mistakes again.

(somber music)