#vesuvius challenge

[catilinas]

AI helps read papyrus scroll burnt to crisp during Vesuvius eruption

Previously hidden text revealed without unrolling scroll discusses stoic philosophy on ethics, art and human behaviour

Researchers uncovered 20 columns of previously hidden text covering more than a metre of charred papyrus without physically unrolling the scroll. The work discusses stoic philosophy on ethics, art and human behaviour and dates to the second or late-third century BC. The age of the scroll, named PHerc 1667, makes it one of the oldest in a collection of hundreds recovered from the library of a luxury Roman villa in Herculaneum that was blasted by heat and buried under ash in the volcanic eruption that destroyed nearby Pompeii in AD79. Much of the Herculaneum library was dominated by Philodemus of Gadara, a Epicurean philosopher and poet in the first century BC. But while the title and author of PHerc 1667 remain unknown, its older age and contents point to another author. Analysis by Nicolardi and her colleagues suggests the text is a stoic treatise, perhaps authored by the Greek philosopher Chrysippus.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

Carbonised Papyrus

University of Kentucky researchers challenged computer scientists to reveal contents of carbonised papyrus, a ‘potential treasure trove for historians,’ as they use AI to read word on ancient scroll burned by Vesuvius in 79 AD.

When blast from eruption of Mount Vesuvius reached Herculaneum in 79 AD, it burned 100s of ancient scrolls to a crisp in library of a luxury villa and buried Roman town in ash and pumice.

Disaster appeared to have destroyed scrolls for good, but nearly 2000 years later, researchers have  extracted first word from one of texts, using artificial intelligence to peer deep inside delicate, charred remains.

Discovery was announced on 12 October 2023 by Prof Brent Seales, a computer scientist at University of Kentucky and others who launched Vesuvius challenge in March to accelerate reading of texts.

Backed by Silicon Valley investors, challenge offers cash prizes to researchers who extract legible words from the carbonised scrolls.

“This is first recovered text from one of these rolled-up, intact scrolls,” said Stephen Parsons, a staff researcher on digital restoration initiative at university.

Researchers have since uncovered more letters from ancient scroll.

To launch Vesuvius challenge, Seales and his team released 1000s of 3D X-ray images of two rolled-up scrolls and three papyrus fragments.

They also released an artificial intelligence program they had trained to read letters in scrolls based on subtle changes that ancient ink made to structure of papyrus.

Unopened scrolls belong to a collection held by Institut de France in Paris and are among 100s recovered from library at villa thought to be owned by a senior Roman statesman, possibly Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, father-in-law of Julius Caesar.

Two computer science students, Luke Farritor in Nebraska and Youssef Nader in Berlin, who took up Vesuvius challenge, improved search process and independently hit on same ancient Greek word in one of scrolls: “πορφύραc,” meaning “purple.”

Farritor, who was first to find word, wins $40,000 with Nader winning $10,000.

Race is now on to read surrounding text. Dr Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at University of Naples Federico II, said three lines of scroll, containing up to 10 letters, were now readable with more expected to come.

A recent section shows at least four columns of text.

“This word is our first dive into an unopened ancient book, evocative of royalty, wealth and even mockery,” Seales said.

What this particular scroll is discussing is still unknown, but I believe it will soon be revealed. An old, new story that starts for us with ‘purple’ is an incredible place to be.”

“Pliny the Elder explores ‘purple’ in his ‘natural history’ as a production process for Tyrian purple from shellfish.

Gospel of Mark describes how Jesus was mocked as he was clothed in purple robes before crucifixion.

What this particular scroll is discussing is still unknown, but I believe it will soon be revealed. An old, new story that starts for us with ‘purple’ is an incredible place to be.”

As only intact library to survive from antiquity, there is immense interest in Herculaneum scrolls.

Most of texts analysed so far are written in ancient Greek, but some may be Latin texts.

Fragments have revealed letters from Philodemus’s work On Vices and Opposite Virtues, and details of Hellenistic dynastic history.

“Strong suspicion is that non-philosophical part of library remains to be discovered and here fantasy runs riot: new plays of Sophocles, poems of Sappho, Annals of Ennius, lost books of Livy and so on,” said Robert Fowler, emeritus professor of Greek at University of Bristol.

“It would be great too to find so-called documentary papyri; letters, business papers, and so on; these would be treasure-trove for historians.”

“Reading words from within Herculaneum scrolls is like stepping onto moon,” Seales added.

“Honestly, I knew that text was there, waiting for us to arrive, but arrival only happens at last step. And with such a talented team working together, reading words is that step into new territory and we’ve taken it."

© The Guardian

[mindblowingscience]

Behold! The First Readable Passages From The Charred Scrolls of Vesuvius

The great libraries of the ancient classical world are legendary.

The great libraries of the ancient classical world are legendary. From Alexandria to Rome to Athens, Baghdad, and Constantinople, these vast archives of times gone by are said to have contained stacks of texts on religion, politics, philosophy, poetry, literature, and the sciences. Only one's collection has survived to the present day, and we can now start reading its contents.

Continue Reading.

[historysurvivalguide]

How do you read a scroll you can’t open?

With lasers!

In 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius erupts and buries the library of the Villa of the Papyri in hot mud and ash

The scrolls are carbonized by the heat of the volcanic debris. But they are also preserved. For centuries, as virtually every ancient text exposed to the air decays and disappears, the library of the Villa of the Papyri waits underground, intact

Then, in 1750, our story continues:

While digging a well, an Italian farm worker encounters a marble pavement. Excavations unearth beautiful statues and frescoes – and hundreds of scrolls. Carbonized and ashen, they are extremely fragile. But the temptation to open them is great; if read, they would more than double the corpus of literature we have from antiquity.

Early attempts to open the scrolls unfortunately destroy many of them. A few are painstakingly unrolled by an Italian monk over several decades, and they are found to contain philosophical texts written in Greek. More than six hundred remain unopened and unreadable.

Using X-ray tomography and computer vision, a team led by Dr. Brent Seales at the University of Kentucky reads the En-Gedi scroll without opening it. Discovered in the Dead Sea region of Israel, the scroll is found to contain text from the book of Leviticus.

This achievement shows that a carbonized scroll can be digitally unrolled and read without physically opening it.

But the Herculaneum Papyri prove more challenging: unlike the denser inks used in the En-Gedi scroll, the Herculaneum ink is carbon-based, affording no X-ray contrast against the underlying carbon-based papyrus.

To get X-rays at the highest possible resolution, the team uses a particle accelerator to scan two full scrolls and several fragments. At 4-8µm resolution, with 16 bits of density data per voxel, they believe machine learning models can pick up subtle surface patterns in the papyrus that indicate the presence of carbon-based ink

In early 2023 Dr. Seales’s lab achieves a breakthrough: their machine learning model successfully recognizes ink from the X-ray scans, demonstrating that it is possible to apply virtual unwrapping to the Herculaneum scrolls using the scans obtained in 2019, and even uncovering some characters in hidden layers of papyrus

On October 12th: the first words have been officially discovered in the unopened Herculaneum scroll! The computer scientists won 40,000 dollars for their work and have given hope that the 700,000 grand prize is within reach: to read an entire unwrapped scroll!

The grand prize: first team to read a scroll by December 31, 2023

Vesuvius Challenge

A $1,000,000+ machine learning and computer vision competition

[frogshunnedshadows]

How Artificial Intelligence Is Making 2,000-Year-Old Scrolls Readable Again

The innovative “Vesuvius Challenge” unlocked a mystery that had confounded archeologists for centuries

How to train algorithms to read illegible, carbonized, ancient scrolls.

[vlacas12]

Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the scrolls!

The 2000-year-old scroll discusses music, food, and how to enjoy life’s pleasures.

This is one for everyone interested in ancient history and Epicurean philosophy. I just learned about this myself today.

Nat Friedman of the Vesuvius Challenge announced that they had just awarded their grand prize for the digital unrolling of a Herculaneum papyrus, which is a HUGE deal in ancient history academics.

Background: nearly all of our classical texts - Greek and Roman literature - comes to us via preservation in the Middle Ages. It is a 'closed corpus' - finds of new texts are extremely rare. The last really historically significant one was Aristotle's Athenaion Politeia in 1891.

Herculaneum was a smallish Roman resort town near Pompeii on the Bay of Naples which was covered with volcanic ash in 79 AD when Vesuvius erupted (like Pompeii). Among the wealthy resort villas of Herculaneum was the Villa of the Papyri, a villa with a large private library focused mostly on philosophy. Some 1,800 scrolls there were carbonized but preserved by the inflow of volcanic ash and have been recovered (intact to wildly varying degrees).

The problem is, of course, the scrolls are both 1) still rolled up and 2) reduced to lumps of carbon, so how on earth do you read them? And that's what the Vesuvius Challenge was focused on: scanning the scrolls using a particle accelerator and then taking that data and digitally unrolling them to produce a readable text. We got our first few words last year, and this year already our first large chunk of text.

It now seems almost certain that over the years to come, we're going to get a steady flow of new fragments and texts out of these, the first large-scale infusion of new texts into the classical corpus since the Renaissance. There are 1,800 of these papyri, 340 are basically complete and another 900 have readable fragments.

Now a few papyri were physically unrolled and partially read earlier (we've had these things since the 1850s) and they were philosophical texts, mostly Epicurean and the first new block of text seems to confirm that the current scroll is ... more Epicurean philosophy. So we're probably in for a LOT of Epicurean philosophy, but even if all we get are philosophical authors the potential texts are incredible: more of Aristotle's Constitutions, missing Plato, and so on.

[catilinas]

First letters found in new scroll

PHerc. 172 (Scroll 5) is here.

VESUVIUS SCROLLS UPDATE!!!!!!

[catilinas]

$60,000 First Title Prize Awarded!

Title of a still-rolled Herculaneum scroll has been read for first time ever

vesuvius challenge update! spoilers: it's more philodemus