These ancient texts were once unreadable. Now technology is decoding them
Burned, baked, or broken, many historic documents were once thought lost to time, but AI and imaging innovations are allowing scholars to reveal their secrets.
People write down lots of things—from epic poems and sacred texts to tax decrees and shopping lists. But these things are of little use to anyone if they can’t be read.
Broken tablets, fragile scrolls, or coded manuscripts have intrigued scholars for centuries. Many devoted countless hours to decoding past people's scribblings. Thanks to them, humanity has compiled a massive knowledge base of writing systems and languages. But some texts still elude our understanding.
In the past few decades, innovative technology has been advancing not only our ability to decode these ancient scripts but also to recover information from objects once thought too damaged to be understood. Tools like X-rays, CT scans, and AI are helped today’s scholars tease out the contents of seemingly impossible sources.
1. The old-fashioned way
In the beginning, 18th- and 19th-century language scholars had to figure out how ancient writing systems worked. To decipher writing in an unknown ancient tongue, they would do the time-consuming work of comparing their samples to other known languages as well as to written works from the era.
In the late 1790s, Napoleon’s troops were stationed in Egypt when they discovered a 4-foot-tall chunk of black rock, now known as the Rosetta Stone. It was once part of a giant stele that dated to around 204 B.C. On it was a pharaoh's proclamation written in three different languages, including hieroglyphics which eluded modern understanding in the 18th century. Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion used the two other scripts (Demotic Egyptian script and ancient Greek) and began a decades-long process of trial and error before he finally decoded Ptolemaic hieroglyphics in 1822.
One of humanity’s oldest poems came to light in a similar matter—with tons of painstaking work. In the late 1800s, Assyriologist George Smith spent hours in the British Museum reconstructing shattered clay tablets covered in cuneiform. He compared the writing to other works from Mesopotamia to reveal the Epic of Gilgamesh, the tale of an ancient hero embarking on a quest for immortality and learning of a great flood that wiped out humanity.
2. CT Scans and computers reveal a holy book
Fast forward to 2016, and scholars announce that they have made a breakthrough deciphering the Ein Gedi Scroll. About 1,500 years ago, the animal-skin parchment was housed in a the Holy Ark of a synagogue on the Dead Sea’s western shore. When a fire tore through community, the town was lost but the ark survived. The intense heat from the fire had hardened the scroll into a charcoal tube.
The Ein Gedi Scroll was carefully preserved for years but scholars did not know its contents. Because of the heat damage, they believed unrolling the scroll might reduce it to dust. How could they look inside it without damaging the fragile material?
In 2015, a team of scientists figured it out. Combing CT scans and specially designed computer software, a virtual copy of the scroll was built. The team could safely unfurl this virtual version, allowing them to see the inner-most layers and access the hidden text. A year later, the team announced their findings: The scroll was between 1,700 to 1,800 years old and contained the first two chapters of Leviticus.
3. DNA and the Dead Sea Scrolls
The Dead Sea Scrolls were one of the most fascinating and famous archaeological finds of the 20th century. They were first discovered in 1947 in caves near the ancient Jewish settlement of Qumran. Since then, hundreds more have been found where they were carefully hidden away some 2,000 years ago. Written on papryus and parchment made of animal skins, they are among the oldest biblical texts ever found.
Tireless scholars have devoted lifetimes to studying these valuable documents, carefully piecing thousands of fragments to determine their contents, origins, and age. Exact authorship of the Dead Sea Scrolls is still hotly debated, but most scholars agree that the documents were written by Judean desert dwellers between the second century B.C. and the second century A.D.
Advances in genetic testing have revealed new information about scrolls. In 2020, a team of Israeli, Swedish, and American researchers tested the ancient DNA of some of the fragments and identified the different animal skin the parchment fragments were made of. This information gives scholars another data point to help reassamble the myriad pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
4. AI and ancient Rome
After Mount Vesuvius erupted 79 A.D., Pompeii and its neighbor Herculaneum were buried in volcanic debris. Both towns have since become living museums allowing visitors to imagine ancient Roman life by the sea. But other treasures, like the library at Herculaneum, have been slower to reveal themselves.
Inside a vast villa at Herculaneum, some 1,800 ancient scrolls were carbonized by the searing heat from Vesuvius’s ash. Hardened into black lumps, the scrolls were discovered in 1752, but nobody knew much what to do with them. Like the scroll found at Ein Gedi, the Herculaneum scrolls were damaged by heat and could not be unrolled. But scholars knew that inside were the tantalizing remains of a rich Roman library, perhaps filled with works thought lost to time. So, scholars hung on to them and waited for a way to unlock the contents.
In March 2023, the Vesuvius Challenge announced a contest: use AI to decipher a portion of the contents of the Herculaneum scrolls. High-resolution CT scans of four scrolls were released, generous prizes were offered, and less than a year later, winners were announced. They had decoded five percent of one scroll, whose contents were described as a ““2,000-year-old blog post about how to enjoy life.”
But this is just the beginning: The Vesuvius Challenge announced another contest for 2024. This time around, the biggest prize goes to whomever can translate 90 percent of each of the four scanned scrolls.
5. The world’s most mysterious book is unreadable. For now
The Voynich Manuscript isn’t as old as the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Herculaneum Library, but its contents are just as tantalizing. Named for the Polish book dealer who purchased it in 1912, the book is 240 pages long and filled with colorful illustrations of astrological symbols, undulating plants, and lively human figures. Looping, handwritten text runs from left to right across its velum pages that date to the early 15th century.
Going by the illustrations alone, scholars believe the book is organized into six sections organized by theme: botany, astronomy, biology, cosmology, medicine, and cooking. Some believe the book contains science while others contend that its sorcery—or perhaps a mix of both.
For centuries, codebreakers have poured over the text, coming up with many different theories to its composition, but none have held up. Some of the most recent attempts by computer scientists employed AI, but nothing has yielded solid results yet.
Today, the Voynich Manuscript is housed in the rare-book collection of Yale University. It has been digitally scanned and made it available online, waiting for the right person or program to reveal its secrets.
