Scientists have deciphered more than 2,000 symbols
Researchers have revealed the first complete passages deciphered from the famously incomprehensible scrolls of Herculaneum. After using artificial intelligence to determine the first word to read from an unopened scroll from Herculaneum, a team of researchers has discovered several nearly complete passages from the ancient text, providing insight into the philosophy of nearly 2,000 years ago.
The Herculaneum Scrolls are hundreds of papyri that survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, CNN reports. In their charred state, the ancient documents would crumble if anyone tried to unfold them, and any writing on the surviving fragments would be almost illegible to the human eye.
Using computer technology and advanced artificial intelligence, researchers can now analyze the Herculaneum scrolls without unrolling them and risking damage to the extremely fragile documents. More than 2000 characters — first full excerpts — have been deciphered from the scroll, according to an announcement made Monday by computer scientists who launched the Vesuvius Challenge to speed up discoveries made on the scrolls.
“It's incredibly exciting to know that these things are available, and now we have mechanism for reading them”, – says Brent Seales, professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky and co-author of the project. Challenge to Vesuvius.
Moreover, the team exceeded all competition requirements and read 15 partial columns of text, which is about 5% of the scroll volume.
The trio unraveled the text by applying a technique known as «virtual unrolling» to a rolled-up scroll — one of several owned by the Institut de France, — which was published on the competition website. The process involved using CT scanning, an X-ray procedure to scan coiled, curved papyrus, allowing researchers to virtually unravel the scrolls and detect ink on the page using advanced artificial intelligence. After Farritor, Nader and Schilliger found the Greek letters, papyrologists from England, France and Italy were brought in to evaluate the text.
“If you look at the level of vocabulary (from the passages), there is some really subtle intellectual conversation going on here. …I'm just thrilled to give scientists a completely pristine, complete copy of what it is so they can do their work and then we can fully understand it,” says Professor Seales, who originally created the method deployment and has been developing this technology for almost 20 years.
More than 1,000 charred scrolls were recovered from the eruption of Vesuvius, a volcano near Naples, Italy, that covered the ancient Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum with volcanic mud. According to the University of Kentucky, charred documents now called the Herculaneum Scrolls were discovered in a building believed to be the home of Julius Caesar's father-in-law.
Recently deciphered passages have been extracted from the end of the scroll and reveal the words written by the philosopher Philodemus, who was believed to be the philosopher in residence working in the library where the scrolls were found, the announcement says.
In the transcribed text, Philodemus writes about the “pleasure” and about whether the abundance of goods available can affect the amount of pleasure they provide. “As with food, we are slow to believe that what we don’t have in short supply is absolutely better than what we have in abundance,” says the first sentence.
Professor Seales said he hoped that almost the entire scroll will be deciphered this year — and the new Grand Prize competition sets an even more ambitious goal, offering a $100,000 cash prize to the first team that can decipher at least 90% of all four scrolls published on the competition website.
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