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An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

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Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#211

Post by kurthr »

tialaramex wrote: post #186
codeulike wrote: post #173

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…

> Do we have better imaginations? Maybe, humans aren't very different, so it depends whether imagination is informed which seems plausible, or whether it is somehow fixed - modern humans don't have different eyesight than in that period, but almost all of them can read whereas back then almost nobody would have been reading these scrolls. > Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingl…

Also perhaps relevant, Vinge's Marooned in Realtime, bobbles (time bubbles) take the remains of humanity with varying levels of technology and culture 50 million years into the future long after a singularity "extinction event" in the 2200s occurs.

Of course the story is just a murder mystery.

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#212

Post by neaden »

seizethecheese wrote: post #166
empath75 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's hard to imagine something more heterodox than Ovid (he managed to get himself exiled by Augustus), and that survived. Medieval readers didn't seem to mind that sort of thing in Greco Roman writing, it was part of their heritage, no one was seriously worshipping those gods so it wasn't seen as a threat. The people in the past behaving in a way that was seen as immoral wasn't a problem.

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#214

Post by adrian_b »

FergusArgyll wrote: post #181
adrian_b wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mos…

> completely different from what the Christian propaganda claimed, e.g. that Epicureans were some kind of sinners addicted to pleasures. Interestingly, in Jewish literature (Talmud and further refined by Maimonedes) Epicurus refers to a certain kind of non-believer, not to a sinner for pleasure. See here for example https://www.sefaria.org/Mishneh_Torah%2C_Repentance.3.8?lang... I always wondered about that because I…

Indeed, the 3 beliefs attributed to Epicureans there, i.e.:

a) one who denies the existence of prophecy and maintains that there is no knowledge communicated from God to the hearts of men;

b) one who disputes the prophecy of Moses, our teacher;

c) one who maintains that the Creator is not aware of the deeds of men.

are actually accurate enough renderings of what an Epicurean might have said in a discussion with a Jew, because as I have mentioned, Epicureans believed that there are gods, but those do not pay attention to humans and do not attempt to communicate with humans, because humans are insignificant for them.

This is quite different from how Epicureans were portrayed in Christian literature, where calumnies against them were preferred for avoiding any direct controversy.

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#215

Post by buddyeah »

tialaramex wrote: post #186
codeulike wrote: post #173

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…

> Do we have better imaginations? Maybe, humans aren't very different, so it depends whether imagination is informed which seems plausible, or whether it is somehow fixed - modern humans don't have different eyesight than in that period, but almost all of them can read whereas back then almost nobody would have been reading these scrolls. > Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingl…

[dead]

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#216

Post by verditelabs »

amluto wrote: post #210
verditelabs wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When you say "physically based rendering" do you mean that one could build a PBR model based on the (unrolled?) xray data, render that model, and be able to see the ink? edit: I found this: https://scrollprize.org/data_browser#/samples/PHercParis4/se... The JSON seems to suggest that I'm mostly looking at ink detection output, but I could easily be using the tool wrong. But I also found this awesome explanation: http…

Some images on that page, specifically the "alpha composite" and "combined alpha" images, are a pretty simple PBR (if it's even that complex; it's just a composite rendering over a 3d array to a 2d image) rendering with no ML based ink detection in the input.

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#217

Post by e40 »

codeulike wrote: post #173

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…

How about audio from pottery? That’s like magic.

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#218

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

verditelabs wrote: post #133
negergreger wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How many scrolls are intact (worldwide, rather than just France) that might still be recoverable?

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#219

Post by ceroxylon »

codeulike wrote: post #173

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…

My first thought was the people capturing encrypted data in the hopes that quantum computing can crack it in the foreseeable future.

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#220

Post by kylemaxwell »

fph wrote: post #174
verditelabs wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Archaeologists think about this a lot. Many digs leave portions intact specifically so that future scientists, with access to techniques and technologies beyond what's available now, can research them.
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