What’s Inside the Ancient Herculaneum Scrolls Revealed by AI

Artificial intelligence helped decipher ancient papyrus scrolls that were turned into blackened blocks of carbon by volcanic ash from Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. The first passage of this easy-to-read text reveals the Greek philosopher's never-before-seen musings.

This discovery won a grand prize of $700,000. vesuvius challengeThey then used a combination of 3D mapping and AI techniques to detect ink and decipher the shapes of the letters in digitally scanned segments of a scroll known as the Herculaneum Papyrus. Winning team members Yusef Nader, Luke Fariter and Julian Siliger help pave the way for further discoveries from additional papyrus scrolls once housed in the library of the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum. there is a possibility.

“I think this is a huge boon to our knowledge of ancient philosophy. It's just a huge amount of new text,” he says. michael mc oscar A professor at the University of London, he was not involved in the discovery.

The winning entry met the Vesuvius Challenge criteria of deciphering at least 85 percent of the letters in four sentences of 140 characters each. Plus, as a bonus, we included 11 more columns of text totaling over 2000 characters.

These rediscovered Greek letters reveal the thoughts of Philodemus, who is believed to have been the resident philosopher of the library containing the Herculaneum Papyrus. The deciphered texts focus on how the scarcity or abundance of food and other goods affects the pleasure they bring. This fits with Philodemus' philosophy of the Epicurean school, which prioritized pleasure as the main goal of life. His 2,000-year-old writings even seem to delve into the philosophy of Stoicism, which “says nothing about pleasure.”

And the Vesuvius challenge is not over yet. Goals for 2024 include finding ways to scale up his 3D scanning and digital analysis technology without becoming too expensive. Current technology costs $100 per square centimeter. That means it could cost anywhere from $1 million to $5 million to effectively unravel the entire scroll, and there are 800 scrolls waiting to be deciphered.

“Realistically, the majority of the known libraries already in the public domain are Epicurean philosophy, and that's what we should expect, but there are also important Stoic texts, perhaps some history and Latin literature. Yes. Full text of early Roman writers such as Ennius and Livius Andronicus. [whose works] “Even if we don't survive, that would be great,” McCosker said. “Epicurus' SymposiumThe book he wrote about the biology of wine consumption would be a lot of fun. ”