Lets reflect on Aristocreon, in about 200 BC, putting their thoughts down on a scroll. They would be aware that the scroll might be kept in a library for some time. Maybe they could have imagined it surviving for 300 years. But they never would have imagined that in 300 years a volcano might destroy the scroll, but in some way preserve it. And then that nearly two thousand years later future humans with machines made of materials unimaginable to Aristocreon, but related distantly to sand and lightning, would be able to read the scroll again and instantly transmit it to nearly the whole planet, a planet with many times more humans than existed in their time. (and speaking of 'planet', in Aristocreon's time, people had fairly recently been able to show that the world was spherical but much of it was still unknown).

Do we have better imaginations? Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?

I am on the vesuvius challenge team that did the segmentation, unwrapping, and ink detection, so feel free to ask any questions.

How awesome do you feel right now? This is HUUUGE! To think that a scroll was unreadable for so, so long, until we invented machines that let us read it slice by slice. It's such an unfathomable achievement - we made machines that let us read 2000+ year olds fragile scrolls without ever opening them - and you helped do just that.

Hats off!

In March I went to Beam Line 18 at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. I had to swap out the scrolls on the xray pedestal. Scrolls that were presented as a diplomatic gift to Napoleon and Josephine by King Ferdinand. France has 2 of the 6 that they were given still in tact. I had to handle both of them. I have never felt more stressed in my life and have never and will probably never again handle such a priceless artifact.

I feel the opposite of that feeling and am immensely proud of everything that the core challenge team has accomplished

How many more scrolls exist?

Do you know what kinds of features the model is picking up on to distinguish ink from papyrus? And did you have any labeled data (images where a human expert has identified ink or perhaps a scan of a burnt scroll with known content) to help train it?

Certainly my Mark 1 eyeballs would not obviously perform better than random guessing at this task. Although my eyeballs are, if nothing else, nerfed by only being able to see a 2D slice of the data.

Yes. Most of the ink we have come across is carbon based. This leaves a certain texture on the scrolls that is recoverable and viewable with fairly basic physically based rendering, though how much ink is recoverable varies greatly from one character to the next. I don't have links handy but we just published updates to our data viewer page on our website. Pherc.Paris.4 I believe has the best overlay of ink.

A lot of labeled data is available on our ftp server which has public access

How fast is the process?

Could it be automated to the point where it's faster to scan a book closed than opened?

We've been trying to automate since the beginning. A lot of it is automated but it's mostly the easier and less damaged parts of the scrolls. Scanning takes a few days for the biggest scrolls but the amount of human refinement is still a multi month process.

Random shower thought: I wonder if it would be better in the long term to stop digging out archeological findings. The more we excavate, the more damage we do for future archaeologists who will have the superpower of reading these texts without even needing to dig the scrolls free and open them.

We stand on the shoulders of those that came before us. People have been trying to unroll and read the scrolls for 250 some odd years now. Had they not laid the groundwork for all that time we wouldn't be making the progress we are now.

Archaeologists are very well aware that theirs is a destructive science, and do their best to mitigate that. The most extreme example is probably the tomb of the First Emperor, Qin Shi Huang, where official policy on excavation can be boiled down to "not yet".

may you please tell us how much effort goes into each type of task in those months?

where else do you think these techniques be applied?

Outstanding work! I've participated in the challenge, but didn't get far. One of the questions I had at the time was - if I'm going to use ML to detect ink, could it invent hallucinated letters, or even parts of text, and how to prevent that?

Yes, it's quite possible for ML to hallucinate ink, though it is on a much more local scale, like predicting a slightly longer stroke, filling in more of a character than is actually in the data, etc. Perhaps enough to change a reading of a character or show where ink isnt. It is difficult for ink detection to hallucinate grammatical and idiomatic greek and latin.

What is the input to the ML algorithm? Does it know the surrounding context so that it has a chance to deduce "if this stroke is slightly longer then the end result will be idiomatic greek and latin"?

The input is 3d chunks of reconstructed CT data from our scans. I can't remember the specifics but maybe enough voxels for .5mm^3 at a time or so? They're all available for free from https://registry.opendata.aws/vesuvius-challenge-herculaneum... . Our trained models are all available at https://huggingface.co/scrollprize

Not all machine learning is generative AI.

True but like regular document scanning software there can be errors in detection.

Just as with redacted documents (consistently blocked terms) or bad OCR jobs (wrong or missing characters), even if only a certain percentage comes out unmangled it is more readable than having no data at all.

A stable base corpus and some dynamic programming will allow you to clean up the remainder[0].

[0]: http://stackoverflow.com/a/11642687/2449774

The problem is when you can't tell which bits are unmangled. OCR systems will happily give you plausible but wrong readings, and even some scanners/copiers will change things: https://dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are...

Massive kudos to the whole team. I've been waiting 30 years for this announcement, ever since I first heard about the scrolls. Fantastic work!

Imagine a worst case scenario: the Herculaneum scrolls turn out to be just the works of this one mediocre pet philosopher. What would we still expect to learn from them, and what would the next step be?

Beats me; I am a programmer, not a classicist.

Though I have an interest in Old Norse and I spend a lot of time reading Scandinavian runestones. > 90% of them are grave markers for a dead father, mother, brother, sister, cousin, etc. If I've learned anything from that, it's that people across time and space all lead lives as real and complex as anyone else's. Their joys were as high as mine have been and their sorrows as low as mine have been.

I'm interested to know about the approaches that you tried with the ML, and then decided to not use. In practice, the options are so many. How did you come up with the final approach - and was there a systematic way to decide which options to go for?

I am not on the research team, rather on the production side of things, so my knowledge on that is pretty limited. I think one of the main takeaways from a lot of the research, though, on both the segmentation side and the ink detection side, is that it's a lot less about what models and techniques and such you use, but how good your training data is. Gathering ground truth is hard, and if you don't have a lot of good ground truth, it doesn't matter if your code is perfect, you'll never get results.

You brought up what I'm most curious about: Where does the ground truth come from for this work since you can't just to unwrap a scroll to tell if the model got it right or, presumably, make a facsimile scroll and wrap it up.

The ground truth comes from manual work. The scrolls can be unwrapped virtually, manually, through extensive pointing and clicking by a human on the boundaries of the scroll. This, in and of itself, is not particularly hard in sections of the scroll that are preserved well, but is extremely tedious and slow and error prone. We have a team of annotators who do manual annotation and refinement through custom software we've written, mostly improving on automatically generated segmentations and unwrappings.

Once you have some unwrapped papyrus, you can render it to an image and look for ink. Ink leaves a certain texture that can be identified by the naked eye and labeled. Between these two processes you get the segmentation and ink detection ground truth. Segments can be flattened virtually through existing software and algorithms.

I'm sure that process is described somewhere on the project's site and, being a lazy human (and unwilling to ask LLMs to summarize it for me), I leaned on you for a human answer. I really appreciate you taking the time to answer. Thank you.

I can see why you'd be attracted to this project from a "let's solve problems computationally" perspective (never mind the historical side). It sounds like there are some cool problems in there.

The eye toward automating the process that the project seems to be targeting is particularly cool, too. This kind of stuff that makes me have real enthusiasm for ML.

That is a general truth of most ML; many models _can_ find the information in the data, if the data is good enough. If it is not, then likely no model can.

> it's a lot less about what models and techniques and such you use, but how good your training data is.

Ah, the good old bitter lesson strikes again

Do we have a sense for what proportion of text is actually retrievable from these scrolls?

That varies greatly on the state of preservation of the scroll. For some of the scrolls we can recover entire columns of text. But this is a best case. Plenty of scrolls, or portions of scrolls, are extremely damaged and warped to where our current methods cannot unroll them through any combination of automated and human driven unrolling. Both of these still have massive headroom for improvement, but achieving that headroom is hard as the preservation gets worse.

To give numbers, for ideal portions of scrolls, we can read 100% of the characters. In nonideal portions of scrolls, we can read 0% of the characters. It's not really possible to quantify how much we could theoretically recover of that 0% through better methods, and how much is truly destroyed.

What are the wildest, most exciting but plausible things that might be discovered in these documents?

I am not a papyrologist or a classicist, rather I'm a computer scientist, so my expertise is unfortunately not in _what_ the scrolls say, rather how we get there. That being said I think and hope that there will be a trove of things that has no known provenance at all, completely lost works that elude the public memory.

Well what were your first thoughts when you decoded the script, besides the obvious Eureka, after making some sense of the texts?

Other members that were on the team before me had already proved it out before I came along so I knew it was possible. The cool thing for me though was specifically doing some physicically based rendering techniques. How well these work varies greatly, but on a few segments in one scroll they work extremely well. I whipped up some simple code to composite layers, did up a render, and without any ML at all was looking at multiple rows of text that no one had read for 2000 years. That was neat.

Probably something along the lines of "finally, now it looks like a coherent piece of text. I wonder what it says".

Your response reminds me of Nigel Richards :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Richards

Congratulations, and thank-you!

Aristotle's second book of Poetics, of course.

Here's a list. The scrolls are from a library that burned in 79 AD.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_literary_works

Woah there was a lost Homer epic comedy about a bumbling fool named Margites?

There's also the Telegony. Odysseus has a son through Circe who winds up killing him and marrying Penelope. Odysseus son through Penelope, Telemachus, marries Circe. There's some wild stuff that doesn't survive.

Looking through these it’s crazy to find out that The Iliad is only 1 of like 5 original texts on the Trojan war. We’re reading book 2 of a 5 book series

Probably a lot more texts of Epicurean philosophy and not a whole lot else unfortunately according to my papyrologist friend.

That's what was thought, but maybe not -- only one of the three so far looks Epicurean, which is not what was expected. Maybe it's a fluke, but historians are buzzing a bit about whether it might be broader than expected.

Why would Epicurean philosophy be unfortunate?

I was under the impression that there was almost nothing left of that school of thought, and that it’s writings had been destroyed.

What would you like to have instead?

The unfortunate part is the lack of anything else therein, not that it's Epicurean philosophy.

The Jewish Talmud uses Epicurus's name as a term meaning "heretic".

The Epicureans were particularly hostile to the Jews and Christians, because Epicureans deny Providence or the active intervention of the divine in human affairs. See Horace Sermones 1.5.

It's more like the Christians and the Jews were particularly hostile to Epicureans and Stoics, because those mocked the claims about the existence of an all-powerful God that requires prayers.

The Epicureans and Stoics did not care much about Christians and Jews, but after the Christians obtained the power in the Roman Empire they made great efforts to persecute and discredit the Epicureans and the Stoics, as the most dangerous kinds of non-believers. (Unlike the rational Epicureans and Stoics, the traditional polytheists could be much easier converted to Christianity, by inventing a set of Christian saints to which the former polytheists could redirect the prayers and the holidays to which they were habituated.)

The Christian propaganda has created a false image of the Epicureans, which has persisted until today.

The Epicureans were not atheists, but they had a very different conception about what Gods are. They thought that in nature there are a lot of entities that have a god-like power, i.e. humans are too small and weak to influence them in any way, but the life of the humans is strongly dependent on the actions of those entities, so they can rightly be considered as gods. Examples of such entities are the Sun, the Moon, storms, volcanos etc.

Unlike in the traditional Greek and Roman religions, where it was believed that for each such natural phenomenon there exists some sentient god, who can be convinced to change the events to a more favorable outcome by prayers and sacrifices, the Epicureans believed that the gods, even supposing that they were sentient, in any case they do not care about humans more than humans care about ants, so there is absolutely no point in praying to them or bringing sacrifices to them.

Therefore humans should conduct their life according to ethic principles, but without worrying about what gods may think about their actions.

Many modern humans would probably agree with the Epicurean philosophy, which was completely different from what the Christian propaganda claimed, e.g. that Epicureans were some kind of sinners addicted to pleasures.

> What would you like to have instead?

History! That's what intrigues me the most: texts with accounts of events that have otherwise vanished from the historical record.

in the paper it says "The recovered text is a philosophical treatise on ethics, and the evidence points to a Stoic work: it turns on human nature, impulse, and the moral progress of human beings, and its final preserved column names Aristocreon — nephew and disciple of the great Stoic Chrysippus — which, together with the language and themes of the text, places it in a Stoic context and dates it to the 2nd century BC."

Absolutely incredible work. This is one of the most amazing news articles I’ve encountered in decades. Congratulations team!

What is your origin story? How did you end up doing this and how can I do the same?

BS in CS from a big state school in the USA. I have a hobby interest in history. I learned about the challenge on YouTube. Got involved contributing because I needed money. Then they put out a job posting. I applied, interviewed, and was hired.

What a cool job, and congrats on great work!

how many scrolls have been scanned so far? what's the main limitation on scan amount?

have any attempts (or just ideas) been made to recreate such charring on known texts?

30 scrolls, maybe? Something like that. I scanned Pherc Paris 4 and Pherc Paris 3 at Beam line 18 at ESRF back in March.

The team did "the campfire scroll" experiment a few years ago to replicate carbonization, unrolling, and ink detection. That is the only case I am aware of. It proved the method could work but it's not a source of say training data; it varies too much from the real scrolls.

The main limitation is time and cost. We have to scan on what is AFAIK the most powerful x-ray beam line in the world. It is not cheap

You had to pay? I understand the machine cost many hundreds of millions of dollars, but I would have thought for academic researchers doing open science, the beamtime is free (funded by the govt / science trusts).

The beam time is unfortunately not free. I scanned Pherc Paris 4 and Pherc Paris 3 in March and had the final shift on the beam. As I was removing the scroll from the scanning pedestal the next team of scientists were already in the lab getting their samples ready. It's a well oiled machine and they've got customers.

The way these things normally work is that the project starts with some sort of a grant. Then that grant pays for all of the costs of the project: peoples' salary, materials used, time on equipment, plus money for the buildings and administration (overhead).

In this case the time on the equipment would need to be included, both a portion of the cost of building/maintaining it, and probably the energy needed to run it. Even where the government is providing the grant (likely here), it still needs to be accounted for.

We - the core challenge team anyway - get no money from any government. We paid for the beam time from our donations and internal funding.

How do get to do that? As in what did you study to get the prerequisite knowledge, and how did you find this particular job? When I see interesting jobs I'm anyways curious what path lead there

I am a computer scientist. I studied CS in university, worked in the semiconductor industry for a while, got started as a participant in the challenge aspect of the Vesuivus Challenge. They were hiring, I sent in an application, interviewed, and was offered the job.

That last sentence is so perfect, like my dad answering the question of how he lost weight. "I ate less and exercised more."

Given the current rate of progress, how long do you think it will take to decipher the entire collection?

That's a tough one to give a strong estimate of. Some scrolls are easier or harder to unwrap and read for a multitude of different reasons, mostly due to how damaged the scroll was in the eruption, and how easy or not the ink is to read. IIRC from what we've scanned of the herculaneum collection, none of the ink is easily visible via spectrum alone, so we have to use a lot of ML and physically based rendering techniques to be able to find ink. That also requires unwrapping and segmentation _before_ any ink detection.

For iron gall ink with high enough iron concentration, the ink stands out in the xray volume through simply masking off low values, such as was shown in our campfire scroll experiment a few years ago. No herculaneum scrolls show similar ink.

Do you think this particular scroll is easier or harder to read that the others will be? Or about average?

Pherc1667 was quite small and just so happened to have readable ink, so it was easier than I expect most others to be.

Do we known what ink is used?

Most of the evidence so far points towards carbon based ink. I am not sure if any of the scrolls we have scanned show strong evidence of iron gall based ink. I know that there are different types and preparation methods for different carbon based inks, but I do not know if it is possible to determine which kind(s) were used solely from inspecting the xrays.

I am, though, not a papyrologist, so historical ink making, preparation, and usage are not my field.

Thanks!

Amazing work, fantastic!

No questions, but I just want to say this is really exciting work!

Did anyone on the team come from a non-science, non-math, non-academia background? Did anyone working on this just teach themselves and start contributing?

Yes. Sean, who was a co-winner of the 2024 prize, IIRC has no formal background in ML, computer science, AI, etc. He is one of our core researchers and the most productive team member.

I've been on the Discord for a couple of years now, and poking around with submissions as well. Sean and the entire team deserve so much praise for all of this work.

It's easy to just read about the breakthrough and see it as one neat, linear line to get there, and hard to comprehend the hours, months and years that so many spent to get there. Big congrats to you, Sean, Nat and the entire team!

That's incredibly impressive.

Major kudos to all of you on your achievements! This is amazing work for anthropology and for society, and it's greatly appreciated.

Are the fragments destroyed in ‘69 and ‘80 available to be read similarly? Or were they disposed of?

I am unaware of those fragments in particular. Though we have scanned a dozen or so fragments, mostly to help guide ink detection, since the ink in them is often more visible in visible and/or near IR light, but can be hard to impossible to detect in the xray spectrum.

this is überragend. by many means!

What contradictions do you think the scrolls contain?

I don't have any concrete tips.

We have very little written material surviving from Rome, at least from the period before a codex (book) was invented, which was more durable that a scroll. Often, we only know of one source describing important events, and when it comes to political struggles and civil wars, the perspective of the defeated party often did not survive. The punishment of damnatio memoriae was practised and even among the early emperors, Caligula and Nero were subject to a form thereof. (This library in Herculaneum was buried 11 years after Nero's death.) I would be surprised if everything in the scrolls perfectly aligned with the record that survived for 2000 years and that was filtered by both random chance and political/religious censorship. Even Christians later destroyed some pagan texts.

BTW personally, I would love for some textbook of Etruscan to emerge from there. This was once again a language whose teaching was banned in Rome.

Only about 20% of the Herculaneum site has been excavated, so there is high probability that more scrolls exist. The current scrolls were not part of the main library, but more of a private collection at the time.

So imagine how cool it would be to find a full library with thousand of scrolls across many different topics, that can now be read with this technology.

This could eventually completely transform our understanding of Antiquity. It is estimated that only around 1% of the ancient works in Greek and Latin have survived to the present day, much less in other languages such as Punic [0]. Some works and some authors we only know by name because they were alluded to in later texts.

It's also well known that surviving texts survived because they were copied again and again on costly animal skin during the Middle Ages, by monks who had to make a choice and naturally favored topics that were of most interest to them.

This could quite literally change everything.

[0] https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2021/09/25/are-there-more-...

I'm not sure what you expect to find that would completely transform our understanding of the time period. The most likely discoveries are going to be filling in details about things we already knew. This period of time was already pretty well documented. Even if we found something amazing like some of Aristotle's lost works, we basically already know what they were and (roughly) what was in them. Really the most interesting and useful finds would be more mundane things like household records, and personal diaries.

Disagree. My understanding is that most surviving works have been transcribed repeatedly over the centuries, often times based on preferences of the people living at the time. There’s a big chance that excavation could find deeply heterodox stuff, I think.

I think it's less that the stuff would be considered heterodox, as just not as good/relevant. Like certain texts were used in the Roman world for school, just kind of universally taught to the literate class. The Aeneid was one of these but before it was written the Annales by Ennius was the classic poem everyone had to learn. Then the Annales became less popular, stopped being taught, and now we only have some fragments of it.

> There’s a big chance that excavation could find deeply heterodox stuff, I think.

Heterodoxy (or really, orthodoxy) wasn't really a thing in 79ad, and you're not likely to find much of it in the private library of a wealthy Roman's vacation home. The only forbidden work you're going to see from that era is stuff critical of the emperor.

I mean heterodox as seen by medieval monks, so deeply unchristian things, for example.

Could change our understanding of history - slavery, early Christianity, politics, secularism among roman elite, etc

Or of technology- steam power, mechanical computation (like the Antikythera mechanism, which is the only known example of such a thing until 1300 years later), mechanized production, mining techniques, etc

We've seen this happen already once with the recovery of palimpsests. Outside of a few lucky discoveries, the vast majority of what monks were discarding were things that were not seen as useful - outdated (to them) legal texts, liturgical books, etc.

The exception though would be Greek literature. Greek literacy collapsed in the early medieval era and a large catalogue was probably just scrapped or discarded before even being collected in Monasteries. Herculaneum could represent a legitimate treasure trove in that regard.

A _lot_ of greek literature survived via the Byzantine Empire and through Arabic translation, though.

Every time you feel depressed by the state of tech, and how so many intelligent people seem to work on forcing ever more ads down people's throats (a common trope around these parts), remember that projects like this do exist too!

There are lots of very smart folks working on incredible things, they just aren't as loud.

This isnt the only incredible thing though, AI is being used to make discoveries in the medial field, and even to prevent sepsis related deaths, cutting down on them by detecting sepsis sooner. There was another that discovered the gene for Alzheimers is what activates it not just a sign of it.

There is a large overlap in what we are doing with the medical field as well. A lot of the segmentation methodology and technology we use and adapt originally came out of the medical field for doing things like brain imaging.

Where are these jobs for non specialist swes?

I wonder what the parellel would be 2,000 years for now:

A Post-Great Solar Flare of 2484 Step Brothers DVD Has Been Decoded

We have successfully uncorrupted audiovisual media of what we believe to be an oral retelling of the long lost ending to Chekhov‘s “The Three Sisters.” It turns out the light was on.

Is this a very obscure Norm Macdonald reference?

Norm? That guy hasn't put out anything new in months.

As I understand it, Pompeii was basically a city of vice and hendoism. Most of the scroll text so far seems to be the ancient version of porn fanfic. So things really never change.

For me, this is one of the most exciting things being done with AI right now. (This and medical research)

I'm kind of obsessed with the ancient world. I dream of being able to read entire pages of new text from ~2,000 years ago.

When I read translations like these, I always wonder if the tone is translated. Did the writer mean to convey a very formal “to the utmost”, or was it a more casual “to the max”.

How much of the translators bias makes these seem like academic papers instead of social media posts.

Any useful translation of an ancient text is accompanied by the text in the original language, so that the reader may assess how faithful is the translation.

For anyone who wants to read ancient texts, there are bilingual editions, for example those of the "Loeb library".

The translations that omit the original text are just for the people who want to have some idea about the content, but do not care about the correctness of the translation.

With a bilingual edition, it is easy to understand the original text even with relatively little knowledge about the original language.

The original text is important because frequently the translator is forced to introduce inaccuracies in the translation, because of the absence of exact equivalents in the target language, which would require a long explanation of the original meaning, instead of just a translated sentence.

Especially misleading are translations where several distinct ancient words are translated using the same English word, so some nuances are lost.

Equally confusing are the cases when the translator chooses to translate the same ancient word by different English words, because even if the meaning of a word may depend on the context, many translators fail to judge correctly the context, because they may lack specialized knowledge so their guesses are not necessarily better than of the readers who may be less competent in linguistics, but more competent in the science or technology needed to understand the context. Better translators prefer to use a one-to-one mapping between words, which makes it easier for the readers to discover the meaning intended by the ancient writer, after seeing multiple examples of usage.

There is a quote, I can't remember by whom, going something like "all translation is interpretation" (IIRC I heard it on a great courses course on the bible).

To think that there is some sort of absolute truth of how something ought to be translated is IMHO just not reality. Especially when it comes to texts that not only were oral literature long before being written down but we of course have no copies of the originals (whatever original means in this context), but only transcriptions of transcriptions of...

Take Beowulf for one. While perhaps Shippeys translation is very much faithful to the copy we have, is it "better" (whatever that means...) than Tolkiens? or Heaneys? Could we say what the poet would have liked more had they sat here in 2026 and read them all? Of course not and having a multitude of different translations is what we need to fully enjoy these texts (since not all will be able to learn the different ancient greek dialects, latin, old english, sumerian, etc., etc. I'm saying this as someone who is now studying ancient greek).

This is why I like literal translations & etymological dives, paired with asking what activities would constitute a life in that time. Ie, you may not need to be a competent archer, but it is a little easier to understand someone who used a particular style of bow if you can play around with that type of bow for a bit.

It's philosophy, it's probably very dense prose. Formal Greek/Latin writing tended to have very long sentences with a bunch of subordinated clauses. People don't really write like that outside of academia or "highbrow" literature right now.

Casual letters and graffiti would be closer to tweets.

let's translate the ancient classic poem Mugger's Paradise by the poet Somewhat Frosty:

While I step through the valley of the shadow of death,

I contemplate my life and perceive that nothing remains.

For I have hurled weapons and laughed for so long that

Even to my mother, my mind appears to have departed.

Yet I have deceived no one except him who was worthy of it;

For me to be held as a coward—that indeed is unheard of.

Beware what you speak and where you set out,

Lest you and your companions be outlined in chalk.

Sometimes there is very little to go on, but we really do have a lot to work with from the late republic and early roman empire.

Latin is also a very rich language and this is no snippet.

Translation is always hard, especially from a couple thousand years ago BUT this kind of translation comes with a lot of confidence.

It’s in Greek, though. Of course same points apply

I can actually read Ancient Greek. LLMS are really bad at it.

> * ἐκ- = “out,” “thoroughly,” “to the end”

ἐκ is more motion away from something. It's often an intensifier in verb compounds but not really as a standalone preposition.

Ancient Greek is a very different language from English. I've found people who try to brute force it by looking up individual words without a knowledge of the grammar end up with a worse understanding of a text that someone who just reads in translation.

I trust a lifelong dedicated Ancient Greek Papyrologist to do a better job here than ChatGPT.

And I don't. Humans are notoriously opinionated in the translations they make.

You might want to read this: https://kashgar.com.au/blogs/history/the-bawdy-graffiti-of-p...

> "we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature, and besides, in the same way as the remaining arts may be said to be perfected in one respect, but to be deficient in practical wisdom in another respect"

- Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8 Year 0. Ish. :}

The person who wrote this was was closer in time to the technology that was able to unwind and read burned fragments of their text, than the technology that build the pyramids. pretty wild to think about.

>technology that build the pyramids

You mean ropes and carts?

How did nvidia make their most powerful GPUs in 2026? You mean sand and metal?

How does ASML make the most modern chips? You mean light and mirrors?

The stones were cut with enormous precision, at least relative to what we know about the available cutting tools. You cannot still stick a knife between a lot of these stones. Maybe we will learn more about that.

I'm pretty sure we've conclusively answered these questions. Hand tools, skill, and absolutely unreasonable amounts of time and patience.

Any master stoneworker from any era should be able to carve stone to that level of precision given enough time and reason. The problem, as always, is that there is usually very little reason to put in that amount of time and effort when you can get 90% as good for 50% the effort.

Can experimental archaeology actually replicate this? If not, I don't find the speculation, even though logical, to be conclusive.

Yes

(I know nothing about this subject, feel free to ignore me.)

My dentist is pretty good at doing this too, by putting marking paper between my teeth and having me bite down. I wonder if a similar technique could be used:

Have the blocks close together, constrained to only move on a single axis by rails or whatever. Drape a thin sheet of material over one of the blocks, the non-moving one (perhaps it's an already-placed one?) Maybe it's something that visibly shows when it's crushed, or maybe it's coated with the blood of the powerless. Smash the other block into it. Pull them apart and look where they made contact. If it's mostly everywhere, done. If not, grind down or chip out the parts that touched. Repeat until you run out of innocents.

To do the very last block, you'd have to meld two sides, remove a block, fix up the other side, and then put it back in. Which might make this testable.

But I'm just pulling stuff out of my nether orifice.

So they were polished? We already know how to do it.

I imagine it's not the first time, It must've at least been proofread at the time of writing :)

But really impressive stuff! Between this and (a particularly optimistic outlook on) the Linear-A news from the other week this is an exciting time for linguistics.

Very impressive! I also highly recommend visiting Herculaneum.

A thought: I guess the days of scratch off lottery tickets are numbered?

I found once super old books in our lab (like hundreds of years) and was wondering what they were used for.

Apparently they did CT scans of closed books and read the content. Polevoy, Dmitry V., et al. "From tomographic reconstruction to automatic text recognition: the next frontier task for the artificial intelligence." Fifteenth International Conference on Machine Vision (ICMV 2022). Vol. 12701. SPIE, 2023. https://iris.unive.it/bitstream/10278/3687069/1/Albertin_et-...

So yeah, but lottery companies probably make it harder by engineering against it.

The tomography was done at a synchrotron (ESRF), and with beamtime being very expensive it would be a net-negative to scan lottery tickets, unfortunately...

Fortunately for anyone wanting to xray lottery tickets, you don't need the IIRC most powerful beamline in the world. A few years ago a Vesuvius Challenge Community member bought a benchtop xray machine for a few grand and scanned pokemon cards and was able to identify them that way.

> "…we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature…"

Beautifully ironic, that we find this message.

Link to the image: https://scrollprize.org/img/firstscroll/banner-full.webp

Where is the direct English translation? I don't care about anything else.

Bottom of the paper, in the appendix. Don't expect much. They only got fragments of text with a lot of missing words.

But wait, the work seems to be from the 2nd century, but it was buried during the Vesuvius eruption in the 1st century?

I love stuff like this because it gives a glimpse into Roman society. To me it seems like they were very similar to us today, forever contemplating learning, existence, gods.

> places it in a Stoic context and dates it to the 2nd century _BC_.

Emphasis mine.

So far this is some of the best uses of ML I've seen to date! This is one of the few things you can point at and say "AI made the world a better place" IMO (this and medical research).

That's not true. AI or ML has been used for a long time in hugely useful, although narrow ways. LLM's have sucked all the oxygen out of the room, but people used to say that the problem with AI was that it always stopped being called AI once it became useful.

This is technology verging on witchcraft!

Amazing!

A scroll has been read ... what does it say ?

A Herculaneum effort.

This is so cool. I feel like it is almost a victory against entropy!

How long till someone uses the hardware and code to process all the redacted data in the epstein files. Why wait thousands of years?

Scrolls from Herculaneum have been read for a very long time. Not disputing the achievement of digitally unrolling one, but the scrolls from the library of have been studied since the 18th century.

I think it's a case of HN once again butchering the title. I submitted it as the exact title from our page on scrollprize.org, "An _Entire_ Herculaneum Scroll Has Been Read For The First Time", which is IIRC true.

Ok, I've restored the entire title above. Sorry about that!

(Btw, you can use the 'edit' link to fix things like this if the software gets a title change wrong.)

*Some scrolls.

They are in a variety of conditions - some of them people were able to "break" open and read. But the vast majority of what remains is too delicate and brittle to risk.

Sure, but its the potential scale that is important. There are also more scrolls still in the ground, which would make sense to dig out if they could be read.

Of course! But the title is misleading and gives people the impression that we don't already know the library is just full of Epicurean texts.

It's also technically incorrect. The texts have been read; this particular text was read for the first time in the modern era.

I thought we were able to read some of these scrolls years ago?

Yes about 2000 years ago we read many of them, we even wrote some too!

Kind of cool. The eruption sort of "froze" some information in time, for later generations to learn from people living ~2000 years in the past.

I'm really hoping that the library contains some lost older Greek works. But its going to be awesome what ever we find.

I'm hoping for a complete(ish) Heraclitus. Also Eratosthenes, whose methods have been described but we don't have the original work where we calculated the circumference of the Earth. Also Hipparchus and Thales.

My pick would easily be the missing books of ab urbe condita by Livy, so much early Roman history that would be wonderfully filled out for us

Also, Aristarchus.