Reading an entire ancient scroll without ever opening it

According to the Adafruit Blog, one of archaeology's cruelest paradoxes may finally be breaking. When Mount Vesuvius erupted nearly two thousand years ago, it buried the library of Herculaneum and carbonized its scrolls — preserving them, but leaving them so brittle that unrolling one meant destroying it. Hundreds have stayed sealed ever since, their words intact but unreadable. The Vesuvius Challenge is changing that, using machine learning to virtually unwrap and read an entire scroll without ever physically opening it, coaxing ancient ink out of scans of the still-rolled papyrus. It's a quiet reversal of that old bargain: a text that survived only by being impossible to read is now, at last, being read.

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