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Preview | The Herculaneum Scrolls

Season 21 Episode 6 | 31s

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, fusing together the layers of the scrolls and making them impossible to read. Can particle physics and AI finally reveal what the scrolls say?

SECRETS OF THE DEAD is made possible, in part, by public television viewers.
Extras
An archaeological team recreates the ascent that Khmer kings would have made up the holy mountain.
Archaeologists dig through layers of earth in search of evidence of pre-Angkorian habitation.
Archaeologists find a small cymbal dating back to the 7th century.
In 2022, a team of archaeologists unearthed a strange burial in the Polish village of Pień.
A forensic artist reconstructs the face of a woman buried as a vampire in 17-century Poland.
A team searches for the remains of the soldiers slain in the Simpsonville Massacre.
The search for the remains of 5th U.S. Colored Cavalry in Kentucky begins.
Researcher Valeria Piano discovers long-lost history of Rome written by Seneca the Elder.
Artificial intelligence is used to find out what some carbonized Herculaneum scrolls say.
Letters between siblings Wolfgang and Maria Anna Mozart suggest she, too, composed music.