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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

#341

Post by frollogaston »

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.

Students find it hard to read poetry in Latin class, but common Romans of the time couldn't read it either. I'm guessing ancient Greek was even more like that. So would assume everything in there is formal and not how people really talked.

Have also heard of graffiti being cited as how people talked, but dunno about that. Our graffiti is definitely not how we talk.

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

#343

Post by frollogaston »

dgellow wrote: post #107
dylan604 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sending a tweet is free and takes zero thought to make it (as the vast majority of tweets prove). Writing something on a scroll would take a lot of effort and would not be free. If these were tweet level content in the scrolls, I'd have to totally reevaluate a lot of things to the point I might as well just become MAGA

You might want to read this: https://kashgar.com.au/blogs/history/the-bawdy-graffiti-of-p...

It's graffiti though

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

#344

Post by ben_w »

NoGravitas wrote: post #337
ben_w wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew? Sure they can, but as one of them once opined: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. What we cannot do, is guess which things so different from our world are, and are not, magic. Are the probabilities in quantum mechanics themselves quantised…

If you can produce negative mass, you can (in theory) make a faster-than-light warp drive, so that would certainly have serious implications.

Also a time machine (assuming there really isn't any fundamentally preferred frame of reference), and a bag of holding.

Fig 5, page 19: https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0207057

Put both together and call it a TARDIS.

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

#345

Post by NoGravitas »

empath75 wrote: post #137
seizethecheese wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Epicureanism was fairly heterodox/countercultural even during its heyday, and our sources on it are much more limited than the sources on more acceptable schools such as Stoicism. For example, we don't really have any writings from Epicurus except for short fragments, when we know from his students that he wrote many books. Much more survives from his students, but even then one of the main sources of our knowledge of Epicureanism (especially before we started recovering Herculaneum scrolls) was Seneca, a Stoic writing about it as a rival school. None of this was forbidden at the time, but it was unpopular (especially among the ruling class) and eccentric (ditto).

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

#346

Post by frollogaston »

bobowzki wrote: post #9

Very impressive! I also highly recommend visiting Herculaneum. A thought: I guess the days of scratch off lottery tickets are numbered?

I always wondered about this, how was there not already tech for a liquor store owner to scan all the lottery tickets without scratching them? On the rare occasions I want to buy a lottery ticket, that's one more reason to only do one where I pick the numbers.

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

#347

Post by troyvit »

zzyzxd wrote: post #236
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…

They already learned to use light and fire to transfer data over long distance. How much difference is there between beacon fire and fiber optic cable? But I think they would be more surprised by how we managed to invent things like social media and AI, which destroy our brain. Ancient societies valued wisdom much more than us and were much more careful when introducing new technologies. It was fascinating for me to…

> How much difference is there between beacon fire and fiber optic cable?

Like ... a lot? Now if RFC 2549 had been around back then you could get the same point across without trying to describe how information, rather than nectar, might flow through the equivalent of a butterfly's proboscis that happens to stretch around the world.

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

#348

Post by xandrius »

kilroy123 wrote: post #11

For me, this is one of the most exciting things being done with AI right now. (This and medical research) I'm kind of obsessed with the ancient world. I dream of being able to read entire pages of new text from ~2,000 years ago.

What's the most interesting le text from olden times that you would recommend?

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

#349

Post by somenameforme »

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…

I don't really think it would be that surprising, if shown to be possible. Imagine you were zoomed into the future and saw technology that teleported you from one place to another for instance, or a single harmless pebble that could provide basically infinite energy remotely, or really basically anything. There's no remotely viable way we know of such things being possible, but if it turned out to be possible, it'd mostly just be a curiosity of how it worked. If somebody tried to convince you it was magic, you'd eyeroll. The greatest discovery might be to find that some sort of magic is real, but good luck convincing somebody of that!

Read ancient texts and they were largely like us, sometimes to a shockingly large degree when considering some aspects of the past, and in many different parts of the world. So I see no reason to think that it'd be fundamentally different for somebody from one of those eras.

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

#350

Post by parsabg »

dcminter wrote: post #323
parsabg wrote: post #316

I'm a big fan of the Vesuvius challenge (and Graeco-Roman history/philosophy) but I'm not convinced if the effort justifies the reward here, relative to other pockets of ancient writings we can use technology for reading and archiving. We have large volumes of clay tablets from Mesopotamia that pre-date these papyri and are considerably easier to read that get nowhere near the attention. E.g. the library of Ashurbani…

Why not both? But that said, my understanding, very likely wrong, was that those were mostly tax records and other lists - which don't fire my imagination in quite the same way as works of philosophy and literature snatched (almost literally) from the flames of history. Now, why should I be more interested in the mesopotamian tablets? (Not sarcasm, I'm interested)

It is true that a large portion of the tablets are probably going to be boring (bills, records, etc). But we mustn't forget that the tablets we have excavated and translated so far have given us gems like the Epic of Gilgamesh and the writings of Enheduanna - the ancient Sumerian princess and the first named author in the history of humanity.

Remarkably, these figures and their writings, dating from ~2300 BC, were as distant from Julius Caesar as he is to us, and yet they played a major role in shaping our world, for instance by setting the early foundations for Judeo-Christian thinking (examples: the flood story, Enheduanna's laments, etc). So we have every reason to be interested in them.

It would, of course, be great to do both. But my point is that it is going to be much harder to attract funders, participants, press coverage, and so on for reading Mesopotamian tablets than for reading Greek or Roman papyri excavated from Piso’s villa in Herculaneum.

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