UK’s Brent Seales, global team secures Europe’s top research grant to digitally decode Herculaneum scrolls

LEXINGTON, Ky. (July 28, 2025) — Brent Seales, heritage science chair in the Stanley and Karen Pigman College of Engineering at the University of Kentucky, has been awarded a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Synergy Grant as part of an international team seeking to unlock the secrets of the Herculaneum scrolls.

The iconic and historically inaccessible ancient texts were carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE.

The $13.5 million (approximately €11.5 million) grant supports “UnLost: Uncovering Lost Knowledge from the Ancient Library of Herculaneum” — a project led by a global consortium of experts in papyrology and computer science.

Seales is one of three co-principal investigators selected for the highly competitive award, which funds only a handful of projects each year and is widely considered one of the most significant research grants globally — with success rates typically below 10%.

“This Synergy Grant gives us the resources and partnership structure we need to pursue what was once thought impossible — a full-scale recovery of the lost library of Herculaneum,” Seales said. “I’m honored to be part of a project that will rewrite what we know about the ancient world.”

Seales is joined in the ERC Synergy Grant by partners in Germany and Italy, including:

• Vincent Christlein, senior researcher and head of the computer vision group in the Pattern Recognition Lab at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg; and
• Federica Nicolardi, associate professor in papyrology at the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federica II (cHI).

Christlein specializes in machine learning approaches to handwriting analysis, as well as the application of AI-based computer vision tools to art and other humanities.

“This is a unique cultural heritage unlike anything that has come before,” Christlein added. “This is the only complete surviving library from ancient times with predominantly Greek and Latin texts that have been discovered in their original surroundings.”

Nicolardi is one of the world’s foremost experts on Herculaneum papyri and is co-developer of software used to digitally reconstruct the fragmented papyri scrolls that have been physically opened.

“Excavated from the ancient city of Herculaneum, these carbonized papyrus scrolls are preserved and present, but in many ways still lost to us today,” Nicolardi explained. “Focusing on this library as the epitome of endangered, lost collections, our project will develop a set of synergistic, cross-disciplinary approaches that can rescue information from the Herculaneum scrolls and other ‘lost’ artifacts.”

“This is a recognition of the strength that can arise only from the synergy of multiple areas of expertise working toward a single goal. We hope that new unopened scrolls from the collection may reveal their contents and contribute to a better understanding of the library and, more broadly, of ancient philosophy, particularly Epicurean philosophy,” Giuliana Leone, Chair of Papyrology, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, added. “We are confident the technologies made available through this funding will transform the approach to studying even the papyri that have already been unrolled. Only through this funding is it possible to increasingly involve young scholars in the comprehensive study of the collection.”

This work brings together ancient history, innovative technology and human curiosity. The multidisciplinary team hopes their efforts will lead to new discoveries — not just insights into the scrolls, but entirely new texts that bring to light voices lost for nearly 2,000 years.

“Every text we’ve uncovered from the opened scrolls has been completely unknown until now. They don’t exist anywhere else in known literature,” Nicolardi explained. “So, if we recover the rest of the still-hidden texts from this library — the only one from the Roman era ever discovered exactly where it was used — we could uncover around 4.5 million words of entirely new Greek and Latin literature. That’s more than the total of all the literary papyri from Oxyrhynchus, all the Dead Sea Scrolls and the entire Bible — combined.”

Building on breakthroughs: The Vesuvius Challenge

The new funding builds on a historic 2023 milestone: the deciphering of the first word ever read from inside an unopened Herculaneum scroll using AI and virtual unwrapping.

Launched in March 2023 by Seales, Silicon Valley partners Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, and a group of investors, the Vesuvius Challenge offered $1 million in prizes to encourage global researchers to help decode the charred scrolls.

The competition released thousands of 3D X-ray scans and open-source tools developed by Seales’ team at EduceLab: A Digital Restoration Initiative at UK — enabling more than 1,000 teams to collaborate on AI models that could reveal ink hidden deep within the papyrus layers.

By August, contestants Luke Farritor, a SpaceX intern, and Youssef Nader, a graduate student in Berlin, had each independently uncovered the same Greek word — πορφύραc (“purple”) — from within a sealed scroll. Their discoveries validated the technology and confirmed the scrolls could be read without ever opening them.

A grand prize was announced the following February, after Farritor and Nader teamed up with another contestant, Julian Schilliger, to reveal 16 partial columns of text — the largest amount of writing ever revealed from within an unrolled Herculaneum scroll.

Both breakthroughs made national and international headlines, as well as marked a turning point in the decades-long quest to access the ancient texts.

"The UnLost project will partner with Vesuvius Challenge, sharing innovative, cutting-edge methods to resurrect and read the carbonized scrolls from Herculaneum," Giorgio Angelotti, tech lead of the Vesuvius Challenge, said.

“The Vesuvius Challenge proved that our tools could scale beyond the lab and spark global innovation,” Seales added. “Now, with the ERC Synergy Grant, we can deepen and accelerate that work at a transformative scale.”

What the grant will do: Unlocking ancient knowledge

The ERC-funded project will allow Seales and collaborators to dramatically scale their efforts to digitally recover, analyze and read text from hundreds of papyrus scrolls.

Over the next six years, the team will apply and expand the virtual unwrapping pipeline developed at UK — which combines high-resolution scanning, machine learning and 3D computational analysis — to read hundreds of carbonized scrolls preserved in the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, the only known library to survive from antiquity.

The project will also develop new tools for analyzing the recovered text, including handwriting recognition, linguistic modeling and real-time digital collaboration among scholars. The goal: to build an open-access digital library of Herculaneum texts — searchable and translatable by researchers worldwide.

The project includes four key technical and research pillars:

• Novel imaging techniques: Layers that stuck together during physical unrolling processes often create a jumbled mix of letters that are difficult to decipher. “For the first time, we will train AI models to detect and digitally reposition misplaced layers,” Nicolardi said. “The project will also apply novel imaging techniques in an effort to access the hidden text and internal structures of multi-layered fragments.”
• AI-powered text detection: Machine learning models — including custom convolutional neural networks and transformer-based architectures — will be trained to recognize patterns of ancient Greek characters within the 3D digital scans prior to unwrapping.
• AI-informed organizational insight and conservation best practices: The UnLost team will connect pieces of scrolls to find patterns in how the ancient library was organized and to figure out the best ways to preserve the scrolls. “By integrating metadata such as material composition and conservation state, we will also create AI-driven benchmarks for papyrus conservation with lasting impact,” Christlein said.
• Digital corpus and analysis tools: The recovered texts will be integrated into an open-access platform that is searchable and translatable by researchers worldwide — enabling real-time scholarly analysis. “We’re not just reading old texts,” Seales explained. “We’re engineering a completely new way to extract, organize and interpret knowledge from one of the world’s most inaccessible libraries.”

Powering the future of heritage science: The role of EduceLab

Much of the research funded by the ERC Synergy Grant will take place at UK’s EduceLab — a new state-of-the-art facility dedicated to next-generation heritage science.

Established with support from a $14 million U.S. National Science Foundation infrastructure grant, EduceLab serves as the technical backbone for Seales’ groundbreaking work in digital restoration.

Equipped with tools in materials analysis, machine learning and micro-CT imaging, EduceLab enables researchers to design, build and deploy custom imaging and analysis pipelines for delicate cultural artifacts — including the unopened Herculaneum scrolls.

As part of the ERC project, EduceLab will contribute to imaging research, algorithm development and high-performance computing that are essential for advancing the virtual unwrapping process.

“EduceLab represents our commitment to combining deep technical expertise with a passion for cultural discovery,” Seales said. “It’s where we translate ambitious ideas into working solutions — and now, into historic breakthroughs.”

Through EduceLab, Seales and his team will host visiting researchers, train students and participate in real-time global collaborations with their ERC partners. For Seales, it’s also a powerful validation of UK’s leadership in digital humanities and computational restoration.

“This is not just a win for me — it’s a win for our university, our students and our commitment to boundary-pushing research,” he said.

About the ERC

The ERC, launched by the European Union in 2007, is the premier European funding organization for research. It funds creative researchers of any nationality to run projects based across Europe. The ERC offers four core grant schemes: Starting Grants, Consolidator Grants, Advanced Grants and Synergy Grants. With its additional Proof of Concept Grant scheme, the ERC helps grantees bridge the gap between their pioneering research and early phases of its commercialization. The ERC is led by an independent governing body, the Scientific Council. Maria Leptin has been the president of the ERC since November 2021. The overall ERC budget from 2021 to 2027 is more than €16 billion, as part of the Horizon Europe program, under the responsibility of European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, Iliana Ivanova. 

This work is supported by ERC grant SyG 101167454 funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

Research reported in this publication was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Award No. 2131940. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. National Science Foundation.