Scrolls count as books, right?
They’ve managed to find actual words in a two-thousand year-old, burned scrolls from Herculaneum.
The exciting bit? The words they’ve read so far appear to be from a previously unknown ancient text. And there are over six hundred other scrolls. If we can read more of them, we’ll find lost texts. Maybe some we’ve heard of, maybe some we haven’t. Either would be amazing!
From the article:
The Herculaneum papyri, ancient scrolls housed in the library of a private villa near Pompeii, were buried and carbonized by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. For almost 2,000 years, this lone surviving library from antiquity was buried underground under 20 meters of volcanic mud. In the 1700s, they were excavated, and while they were in some ways preserved by the eruption, they were so fragile that they would turn to dust if mishandled. How do you read a scroll you can’t open? For hundreds of years, this question went unanswered.
So if I’m understanding this correctly, they did a extremely high resolution CT scan, but it’s not possible to determine the letters from that. However by using other fragments of scroll as a ground truth, you can train a model to pick up on subtle differences in the fibres where there has been ink. That’s very cool!
Yes, the exciting thing is that they used two different methods, they both worked and they each independently confirmed the other’s findings! That’s why they’re so confident in the words they found.
The big hope now is that they’ll be able to keep refining and developing the systems to get more out of the scrolls.