Here’s some good news. There’s been a million dollar contest going on to figure out how to use high tech to read a Herculaneum library of extremely fragile scrolls that were damaged by the 79 A.D. Mt. Vesuvius eruption. They can’t be unrolled without crumbling into dust. But now we have particle accelerators. The extremely vague scans have been publicly posted online and computer scientists have been invited to take a crack at reading them.
Resurrect an ancient library from the ashes of a volcano.
Win $1,000,000.The Vesuvius Challenge is a machine learning and computer vision competition to read the Herculaneum Papyri.
This open source project is now making progress.
Today we are announcing a major breakthrough in the Vesuvius Challenge: we have read the first word from an unopened Herculaneum scroll.
— Nat Friedman (@natfriedman) October 12, 2023
The word is "πορφυρας" which means "purple dye" or "cloths of purple."https://t.co/0EDGBX4t4h
Congratulations to 21yo computer science… pic.twitter.com/VLwtU9I8xl
So, what will they find?
Probably a lot of the rich guy who owned the villa’s bookkeeping. But that could be interesting because that is the least likely kind of writing to be copied and recopied during the 1400 years between the destruction of Pompeii and the invention of the printing press. Nothing survived more than, say, a thousand years without being copied, so we have very, very few original scrolls from the Roman-Greek world like these. Virtually everything that was passed down to us has gone through several rounds of selection bias, typically in medieval monasteries:
Monk: “Box XXIII got damaged in the flood. Which scrolls should we recopy first before they become unreadable?
Abbot: “What’s in it?”
Monk: “Our library’s only copy of The Iliad and what appears to be some purple cloth merchant’s bookkeeping records.”
Abbot: “Recopy The Iliad with highest priority and junk the accounting.”
Any speculations on what else might be found?
