Vesuvius Challenge/University of Kentucky
Hundreds of badly charred ancient Roman scrolls discovered in a Roman villa were long believed to be illegible, but a 21-year-old University of Nebraska-Lincoln computer science student believes they are illegible was. Successfully read the first text Using a machine learning model, it’s hidden inside one of the scrolls that rolls up. This achievement earned Luke Farriter his $40,000 inaugural letter award. vesuvius challengea collaboration between private entrepreneurs and academics, offers a series of rewards for milestones in deciphering the scrolls.
The second contestant, Yusef Nader, won the small $10,000 First Ink prize for being essentially the second person to decipher the text on the scroll. The main prize of $700,000 will be awarded to the first person to read four or more of his passages on the scroll by December 31st. The founders are optimistic that this goal is achievable given these latest advances.
As previously reported, the ancient Roman resort city of Pompeii was not the only city destroyed. The catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Several other cities in the region, including the wealthy enclave of Herculaneum, were gutted by clouds of hot gas called pyroclastic flows. But still, some remnants of Rome’s wealth survived. A palatial mansion in Herculaneum, thought to have once belonged to a man named Piso, contains hundreds of books made from papyrus burned to carbon by volcanic gases. Precious scrolls were kept there.
The scrolls were buried under volcanic mud until the 1700s, when archaeologists believed they kept the personal library of an Epicurean philosopher named Philodemus. More scrolls may still lie in the lower floors of the villa that have not yet been excavated. Several opened fragments have helped scholars identify various Greek philosophical texts, such as: about nature Works by Epicurius, some by Philodemus himself, and a few Latin works. However, the more than 600 scrolls were so fragile that they could crumble even if touched, and it was long believed that they could never be read.
EduceLab/University of Kentucky
“This was the country villa of a sophisticated Roman aristocrat, and Piso would have had many books, especially in Latin, but so far very few books have been found in the villa,” said the classical scholar and author of the papyrus. said expert Robert Fowler. bristol, england, he told the New York Times. “If such a library were restored, our knowledge of the ancient world would change in ways we cannot imagine. The impact could be as great as the rediscovery of Renaissance manuscripts.”
Scientists have deployed all kinds of cutting-edge tools to decipher badly damaged ancient texts like the Herculaneum Scrolls. For example, in 2019 German scientists used a combination of: physics technology (Synchrotron radiation, infrared spectroscopy, X-ray fluorescence) De facto “deployment” ancient egyptian papyrus. Their analysis revealed that the seemingly blank areas on the papyrus actually contain writing written with something that became “invisible ink” after centuries of exposure to light. It became clear that
Brent Searles’ lab at the University of Kentucky has been working on deciphering the Herculaneum Documents for many years.he another way He was filmed in 2016 ‘opening up’ a scroll found on the west bank of the Dead Sea and using it to reveal the first few verses of Leviticus, ‘virtually unrolling’ the damaged scroll. .So-called Scroll of En Gedi It was recovered from the ark of an ancient synagogue that was destroyed in a fire around 600 AD. To the naked eye, it resembled a small lump of charcoal, but it was so fragile that there was no safe way to analyze its contents.
