The University of Kentucky has announced a new one million dollar prize for the first person who manages to fully read one of the ancient papyrus scrolls recovered from Herculaneum. The challenge, revealed this week, is open to anyone in the world, with a deadline of next June to decipher and interpret a complete scroll.
The scrolls were written nearly 2,000 years ago and were long thought to have been lost to history. They were buried under volcanic ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted, leaving the papyrus charred and far too fragile to unroll by hand. For generations they were described as among the most inaccessible manuscripts in the world.
They were first discovered in the 18th century among the ruins of a villa in Herculaneum, an ancient Roman town destroyed by the same eruption. The property is said to have belonged to the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, and the library of scrolls it held has tantalised scholars ever since it was found.
What has changed is the technology. Using new scanning and imaging techniques, researchers can now read the blackened, rolled-up scrolls without physically opening them. The advance was significant enough that an earlier prize was shared by the team that first managed to read passages of ancient Greek hidden inside the papyrus.
Since that first success, researchers say they have managed to read around 10% of the material, with hundreds more scrolls still waiting to be analysed. Those involved believe it is now only a matter of time before the full collection can be unwrapped and studied in proper detail.
The new University of Kentucky prize is intended to accelerate that work. The university has pledged one million dollars to whoever, anywhere in the world, is first to decipher and interpret a full scroll by next June, and the scanned scrolls have been made publicly available so that anyone can attempt the task.
For the researchers, the stakes reach well beyond the prize money. Reading the texts offers a rare glimpse into an ancient world in which philosophers questioned existence in much the same way people do today. One described it as a completely new world for research, while others called the wider effort history in the making.