(Dr Handmer and Mr Nader both received $10,000 prizes.) Mr Nader has since produced an image from the scroll showing four columns of text, side by side. The same word was later found by Youssef Nader, a robotics student at the Free University of Berlin. Mr Farritor built on work by Casey Handmer, a former NASA physicist, whose examination of X-ray images of Banana Boy’s charred layers identified a characteristic “crackle pattern” indicating the presence of ink. It was uncovered by Luke Farritor, a computer-science student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, earning him a $40,000 prize. The first word to be found, announced on October 12th, was “porphyras”, which means “purple” in ancient Greek (see picture below). Now, nearly 2,000 years later, words from inside Banana Boy have been revealed for the first time, after volunteers competing in a prize challenge used X-rays and artificial intelligence to do the unrolling virtually. Along with hundreds of other scrolls in the villa’s library, it was carbonised when scorching gases engulfed the town during the same eruption of Mount Vesuvius, in 79AD, that also buried the nearby town of Pompeii.Īlthough the scrolls survived, their charring means that unrolling them is almost impossible. It is in fact a papyrus scroll, found in the ruins of a villa in the Roman town of Herculaneum, in Campania. THE OBJECT known as P.Herc.Paris.3 resembles a dark grey lump of charcoal, about the size and shape of a banana.

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