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After using artificial intelligence to reveal the first word to be read from an unopened Herculaneum scroll, a team of researchers has uncovered several almost complete passages from the ancient text, which provide insight into philosophy from nearly 2,000 years ago.
The Herculaneum scrolls are the hundreds of papyri that survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. In their charred state, the ancient documents would crumble if anyone tried to unroll them, and would any writing on pieces that survive is almost illegible to the human eye.
By using advanced computer technology and artificial intelligence, researchers can now analyze the Herculaneum scrolls without damaging or harming the extremely fragile documents. More than 2,000 characters — the first full passages — have been removed from a scroll, according to an announcement Monday by computer scientists who launched the Vesuvius Challenge, a competition designed to accelerate the discoveries made on the scrolls.
“It’s very gratifying to know that these things are available, and we now have a mechanism to read them — and that reading them will create a whole field of study and scholarship for the classics,” said Brent Seales, a professor at in computer science at the University of Kentucky and co-creator of the Vesuvius Challenge.
Luke Farritor and Youssef Nader — a computer science student at the University of Nebraska and a bio-robotics graduate student at Freie Universität Berlin, respectively — found the first word to be read from an unopened scroll in October. This year, together with Julian Schilliger, a robotics student at ETH Zürich, the three of them have won the competition’s $700,000 grand prize for being the first team to find more than 85% of characters from four consecutive indoor passages of the same scroll.
In addition, the team went above and beyond the competition’s requirements and read 15 partial columns of text, representing approximately 5% of the scroll.
The trio revealed the text by applying a technique known as “virtual unwrapping” to the scroll – one of many owned by the Institut de France – released on the competition’s website. The process used computer tomography, an X-ray procedure to scan the coiled, warped papyrus, allowing researchers to virtually flatten the scrolls and detect the ink on the page with advanced AI. After Farritor, Nader and Schilliger found the Greek letters, expert papyrologists from England, France and Italy were brought in to assess the text.
“If you look at the level of the dictionary (from the passages), there is a very innovative intellectual conversation going on here. …It makes me happy to try to deliver a complete copy of this material to the students, so they can do their work, and then we can fully understand it,” said Seales, who originally created the unfolding method. . and has been developing the technology for almost 20 years.
Words from an ancient philosopher
Over 1,000 carbonized scrolls have been recovered from the eruption of Vesuvius, a volcano near Naples in Italy, which covered the ancient Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in volcanic mud. The charred documents, now known as the Herculaneum scrolls, were found in a building believed to be the home of Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, according to the University of Kentucky.
The recently decoded passages were pulled from the end of a scroll and reveal words written by the philosopher Philodemus, who is believed to be the philosopher-in-residence working at the library where the scrolls were found, the announcement said.
In the expository text, Philodemus writes about “joy,” and whether an abundance of available goods can affect the amount of pleasure they bring. “Similarly in the case of food, we do not immediately believe things that are scarce to be more pleasant than those that are abundant,” reads the first sentence.
“Philodemus was dismissed over the years because we could not read his passages widely. With one difficulty, we only get these small clips. … (In these passages) he is persuading the people listening to him to relax, find good friendships, spend your time living in the present and enjoying pleasure,” said Roger Macfarlane, professor of classical studies at Brigham Young University, who studied the Herculaneum scrolls. Mac Farlane was not involved in the discovery but took part in confirming the first word that came out in October.
Seales said he hopes to dismantle nearly an entire scroll this year – and that the new grand prize competition sets a more ambitious goal, offering a $1 million cash prize to the first team to complete at least 90% of the four find. scrolls released on the tournament website.
“The winners of the Vesuvius Challenge are able to find a text that is authentic but does not result in the destruction of the scroll. And that’s probably the most miraculous thing about it,” said Mac Farlane.
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