The scrolls are part of the Herculaneum Papyri, discovered in the 1750s in a luxury villa buried by the same eruption that destroyed Pompeii. For centuries, they were considered impossible to read, as physical unrolling would destroy them. The breakthrough came from combining high-resolution X-ray tomography, which sees through the carbonized layers, with machine learning algorithms trained to detect the slight density differences of ancient ink. In 2023, the Vesuvius Challenge incentivized this