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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

#131

Post by Rebelgecko »

inglor_cz wrote: post #28
verditelabs wrote: post #2

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

I don't have any questions, just a comment. You have a potential to rewrite the history of European Antiquity quite substantially. The Herculaneum set of scrolls is enormous and must contain a lot of hitherto unknown. That comes with a set of peculiar risks. Once your work starts producing something that contradicts previous work of Very Important People, they will lobby to stop you. Be prepared for that. Science sho…

What contradictions do you think the scrolls contain?

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

#132

Post by sapphicsnail »

kouru225 wrote: post #69
colechristensen wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#133

Post by verditelabs »

negergreger wrote: post #122
verditelabs wrote: post #2

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

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.

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

#134

Post by verditelabs »

larkost wrote: post #130
CGMthrowaway wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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…

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

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

#135

Post by tremon »

arikrahman wrote: post #70
verditelabs wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

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

#136

Post by neaden »

seizethecheese wrote: post #106
empath75 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 int…

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.

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

#137

Post by empath75 »

seizethecheese wrote: post #106
empath75 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 int…

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.

> 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.

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

#138

Post by empath75 »

legitster wrote: post #116
empath75 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 int…

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…

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

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

#139

Post by sapphicsnail »

charcircuit wrote: post #66
clickety_clack wrote: post #16

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.

After sticking it into CharGPT I can tell you it's neither. The word upmost is coming from is a form of the compound verb ἐκπονέω. * ἐκ- = “out,” “thoroughly,” “to the end” * πονέω = “to labor,” “to toil,” “to work hard”

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.

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

#140

Post by sfink »

inglor_cz wrote: post #61
sevenzero wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>technology that build the pyramids You mean ropes and carts?

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 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.

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