Making headlines around the world, Brent Seales and his team of computer scientists set out on a mission to read the 2,000-year-old carbonized scrolls found in the remains of a villa in Herculaneum. Mt. Vesuvius’s eruption in 79 AD transformed the papyri,...

The Herculaneum papyri are carbonized scrolls from the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum.

Nearly two-thousand years ago, Mount Vesuvius buried the ancient city of Herculaneum, and with it, a library full of ancient papyrus scrolls. In 2018, Bill Whitaker reported on an international race to unravel the scrolls' secrets.

Brent Seales, computer science professor at the University of Kentucky, discusses his work, spanning two decades, of rescuing ancient text like the carbonized scrolls of Herculaneum.