In October 2023, Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples, received an image of a fragment from a papyrus scroll burned in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. This scroll, one of many found in an ancient villa in Herculaneum, has been mostly unreadable due to its fragile, carbonized state. Nicolardi is now part of the Vesuvius Challenge, a project using artificial intelligence (AI) to uncover historical texts. Thanks to AI, images revealed Greek letters from the scrolls, making once-inaccessible texts legible, marking a transformative moment for her field. AI's application in this context signifies a broader shift in how ancient texts are studied. Neural networks, particularly convolutional and recurrent networks, have made it possible to fill in gaps in historical texts and translate languages, from Greek inscriptions to Chinese Oracle Bone Script.

Projects such as those by Thea Sommerschield and Yannis Assael at the University of Oxford have utilized machine learning to restore missing parts of Greek texts with impressive accuracy. Their model, Ithaca, has improved upon these methods by using transformer models to better decipher languages. In South Korea, researchers are tackling vast historical archives with AI to translate the Hanja language, while in Greece, models assist in decoding Linear B texts with potential applications for the undeciphered Linear A script. The Vesuvius Challenge itself has overcome the problem of reading text in scrolls that cannot be opened, using high-resolution CT scans and advanced AI models to virtually unwrap and read the text. Brent Seales and his team at the University of Kentucky, in partnership with the challenge, have made significant progress. Their efforts were boosted by a public contest, resulting in a readable text of Greek philosophy thought to be by Philodemus. Efforts are ongoing to refine these techniques, solve the challenge of virtual unwrapping, and apply this method to other hidden texts, with the hope of eventually reading all Herculaneum scrolls, potentially uncovering the largest discovery of texts from the ancient world.