A Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

Posted by verditelabs 4 hours ago

A Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time(scrollprize.org)

319 points | 86 commentspage 2

bobowzki 3 hours ago|

Very impressive! I also highly recommend visiting Herculaneum.

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

roflmaostc 2 hours ago||

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.

cl3misch 3 hours ago||

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...

verditelabs 2 hours ago||

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.

cwillu 2 hours ago||

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

tern 2 hours ago||

> "…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.

ur-whale 1 hour ago||

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

INTPenis 2 hours ago||

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.

verditelabs 2 hours ago||

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

Emphasis mine.

charcircuit 2 hours ago||

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

shevy-java 2 hours ago||

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.

tokai 3 hours ago||

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

helterskelter 2 hours ago|

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.

annodomini2019 2 hours ago|||

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

helterskelter 1 hour ago|||

Also, Aristarchus.

josefritzishere 2 hours ago|

This is huge, we're about to learn so much about ancient texts.

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