Vesuvius Challenge: First letters found in new scroll

It's definitely one of the most fascinating things I've seen here.

The challenge is an amazing example of what today's technology can do. We have rolled up papyrus scrolls that were carbonized two thousand years ago. They look just like bits of charcoal and they're so fragile that any attempt to physically unroll them would be quite destructive.

Yet our technology allows us to read their contents. That's fascinating, and gets even better considering how many of those scrolls are likely new texts to us.

This project is a gem, I invite everybody to read their landing page, especially the page announcing the Grand Prize winner of last year, where they also quickly describe the project [1], and the Master Plan [2], where they talk about their goals.

As a recap: - The real, narrative part of ancient Roman and Greek history comes from the tiny minority of texts survived by being copied through the centuries by medieval monks. We know a lot through archeology, epigraphy (engraved stones) etc., but the meat comes from the few ancient historians, philosopher, poets and so on we can read because medieval clerics thought them worthwile to preserve. - An exception to this are papyri, ancient "paper", on which they wrote both high literature and grocery lists. They were used all over the ancient world, but most of them survived only in Egypt and other dried areas, for obvious reasons. They represent the one direct link to the texts as they were written at the time, apart from engraved stones (which, though, tends to be mostly gravestones, with some laws and political stuff thown in). Unfortunately, the great majority of papyri are fragments, and most of them concern bureaucratic stuff like receipts, contracts and the like, with sometimes a private letter or half a page from a literary work. Precious for historians, but not the kind of thing that changes our knowledge of history. - But here it comes the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum, the town that shared the fate of Pompeii and was covered by vulcanic ashed from the Vesuvius' eruption of 79 A.D. The Villa was the home of a Greek philosopher, and there people found, at the end of the 18th century, 300 carbonized scrolls from the studio of the guy. These scrolls represent an absolute rarity: hundreds of complete works, most likely never met before, from the haydays of the Roman Empire. They're probably mostly philosophical books in Greek, but they could also contain lost plays, unknown great poets or histories about periods which have few or no sources about (we know that there were whole histories of the career of Alexander the Great that are now lost, we have dozen-of-years-wide holes in our knowledge of most of classical history etc.), - Unfortunately, these 300 scrolls are just lumps of coal. They've been cooked by the volcano's ashes and fused shut. Any attempt to open them in the past caused the destruction of most of the scroll, and for hundred of years they've been considered lost. - Until today! A breakthrough in CT scanning technology (brought by one of the founding teams of this project) has made possible to scan this kind of ancient scrolls with X-rays, accessing the internal "pages" without destroying them. - Having a scan of the internal volume of the scrolls was all well and good, but still you couldn't read anything! The scan doesn't pick up the ink, and it wasn't at all sure that there was a way to do it. That was the objective of last year challenge, gathering a community of competitors and mates to use computer vision and machine learning to virtually unwrap the scan and detect the ink inside, using AI's ability at finding patterns invisible to the human eye. - In only 8-9 months last years challenge was completed successfully, earning the winning team a big prize (almost a million, if I remember correctly?). We were able to read some pages from inside a sample scroll, showing forever that the task is possible! - The goal of 2024 was to expand this PoC to read 5 whole scrolls and to improve the scanning process. At the moment we don't know if the model developed for the Grand Prize of last year can be applied to the text of other scrolls, and anyway the whole scanning-and-virtual-unwrapping thing is incredibly time consuming and expensive and requires extensive optimization. I don't think there's been any major breakthrough till now, but of course many teams could be waiting the end of the year deadline to publish, since it's still a competition with money involved. - If the project is successful, the long term gains could be astounding. It's not only the 300 scrolls we already possess, but the possibility that a whole library could exist, yet to be excavated, in the still buried part of the Villa. You have to consider that its owner was a rich magnate hosting Greek philosophers for the heck of it. It's probable that he owned a big library, far bigger than the comparatively small one found in the studio of the philosopher. If we can develop a method to reliably read carbonized scrolls, the political impetus to dig the rest of the site would be difficult to resist. I'm Italian, I'd personally go in Rome to protest against the government if they didn't allow it :D - Finding this hypotetical library would be like finding a mini Library of Alexandria, a revolution in our knowledge of the ancient world. If you're even just a little bit interested in this kind of stuff, this is the Holy Grail!

As a programmer (boring CRUD stuff) with a master's degree in ancient history (but I've forgotten most of my Greek and Latin), this project tickles both side of my life, my old academic aspirations and my current career. Unfortunately I'm not advanced enough in any of them to really contribute, since the tech part is super-advanced CV and ML stuff I can't even pronounce and decifring papyri is a whole new ball game compared with the tame texts I was translating at university. That's why I'm trying to evangelize about it, to at least contribute a little to its success!

[1] https://scrollprize.org/grandprize [2] https://scrollprize.org/master_plan

What an interesting technical challenge and puzzle. The fact these were traded for a few kangaroos is hilarious - I wonder who decided on that exchange rate!

I know they have instructions on where to buy papyrus and how to cook it to resemble the conditions of the original scrolls, but from what I understand, nobody has done what you suggest. It sounds like a good idea to me also, but a few suggestions on why they haven't done it yet:

1) Scanning a scroll costs around $40k, between the trip to London, renting the equipment, paying the staff etc.

2) I'm not sure that just cooking the scroll is enough to reproduce the exact conditions of the original, which were also buried underground for thousand of years. Time, soil pressure and so on could have a big impact on the final composition of the sheets.

3) To actually reproduce a realistic sample, you need a professional papyrologist. It's not enough to copy an Ancient Greek text from an online database, you need to know all the conventions of the handwriting of the time (they didn't use spaces, they didn't use the diacritics and accent marks we use in modern editions, often letters where written in idiosyncratic ways depending on the period etc.). Considering how few papyrologists there are, how busy they are, and how long would take one of them to recreate a decent replica, I think this is maybe the biggest obstacle.

1/ and 2/ are of course good objections; I wasn't aware of the cost of a scan (but this kind of experiment could be done by the organizers, saving on trip costs).

But I don't think step 3 is strictly necessary. The main point would be to improve software unrolling, using information from the structure of the roll. So it may be enough to simply put printer's mark at regular intervals, with references.