(NewsNation) —  Nearly 2,000 years later, researchers have identified a word from a still-closed ancient scroll that was burned by the Mt. Vesuvius eruption in 79 C.E.

The single word, “porphyras,” which means “purple,” was visualized by 21-year-old Luke Farritor as part of the Vesuvius Challenge, a competition to unlock the secrets of the famed Herculaneum scrolls using modern technology.

Farritor, an undergraduate student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, made the discovery using a machine-learning model he developed and won $40,000 for his efforts.

It’s a significant breakthrough for scholars who have been trying to read the ancient manuscripts ever since they were found in the 1700s.

That hasn’t been easy. The scrolls, which were carbonized by volcanic debris, aren’t able to be opened and would turn to dust if mishandled.

Led by Dr. Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, a team of researchers spent years developing a way to digitally unroll ancient manuscripts with X-ray images.

But only with recent developments in artificial intelligence has Seales’ lab been able to successfully recognize ink from the X-ray scans.

In order to accelerate the decoding efforts and encourage others to build upon the AI technology, Seales helped launch the Vesuvius Challenge with $1 million in prize money.

“These texts were written by human hands at a time when world religions were emergent, the Roman Empire still ruled, and many parts of the world were unexplored,” Seales wrote in a statement. “Much of the writing from this period is lost. But today, the Herculaneum scrolls are unlost.”