RESEARCHERS have used artificial intelligence to help them decipher a 2,000-year-old scroll unearthed from the ashes of Mount Vesuvius.
Pompeii's Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79CE, burying a library of scrolls under volcanic ash where the messages inside have remained a secret.
The rolled-up papyrus was excavated from the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum in the 18th Century.
They are believed to have been stored in an enormous villa, once owed by the father-in-law of Julis Caesar.
Each scroll is incredibly damaged and delicate, and therefore, rather difficult to open - let alone read.
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The Vesuvius Challenge was launched by scholars from the University of Kentucky in March with the aim to make their decoding a global effort.
The Challenge offered up thousands of X-ray images of charred Herculaneum scrolls for anyone to have a stab at decoding.
Researchers and AI experts can bag $700,000 (£575,000) if they are the first team to read at least four separate passages in the scrolls by December 31st.
Any submissions are reviewed by a team of developers and papyrologists for legitimacy and plausibility.
Two students have emerged as the first to decipher a word in one of the scrolls.
Luke Farritor, a computer science student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Youssef Nader, a biorobotics grad student at the Free University of Berlin in Germany stumbled across the same discover separately.
The first word has been revealed to be: "πορϕυρας".
This means "porphyras" using modern Greek characters, otherwise known in English as "purple".
The rest of the scroll remains a mystery.
In ancient Rome, purple often represented wealth and status.
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It is thought the word could refer to robes or to rank.
However, further analysis of the scrolls will be needed to know for sure.
