Researchers at the University of Kentucky have made a historic breakthrough by reading from the Herculaneum scrolls.

They contain ancient texts, but due to their now charred and carbonized state, they've been considered unreadable for more than 2000 years.

Brant SEALs, a computer science professor at the University of Kentucky, and his team spent the past two decades creating high tech tools to rescue the hidden texts.

This year, SEALs and his team released IT software and thousands of 3D images on the rolled up scrolls.

They hope a $1 million prize will encourage other researchers to build upon their A.I.

tools and help speed up the decoding of the ancient texts.

In the first century.

The first century was was an amazing point in human history.

And we have we have so little of that material.

They estimate maybe we have lost 90 or 95% of the written material from antiquity.

My expectations were low because I'm a trained as a computer scientist, but as the classicists have educated me, what I expect is writing that expresses what it means to be human.

Speaking of love and of war and.

And of the things that still matter to us because we are human, just like they were human and the gulf that separates us.

The 2000 years is much more narrow than you might think.

The development represents a major step toward unlocking the entire collection of Herculaneum scrolls with the potential for one of the largest discoveries from the ancient world.