https://theprogressnetwork.substack.com/p/a-mystery-from-79-ad-solved
"When Mount Vesuvius erupted 2,000 years ago, Pompeii wasn’t the only Roman
city it ravaged. Just a couple hours’ chariot ride away, Herculaneum was also
buried—under 50 feet of volcanic ash that similarly preserved its buildings and
artifacts underneath.
One of those buildings was the Villa of the Papyri, a massive waterfront
structure likely owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law that was home to the
lone library from that time to survive. Comprising thousands of papyrus
scrolls, scholars believe it is a trove of ancient plays, poetry, and
philosophy, and may hold unknown works by the likes of Sappho, Sophocles, and
Aristotle.
“Believe,” because while we’ve known about this gold mine of historical riches
since excavators first discovered it in 1750, we’ve never been able to confirm
its contents. Although the interiors of the scrolls are essentially intact,
their exteriors were carbonized by Vesuvius’ scorching-hot gas blast; over the
years, attempts to open the scrolls resulted in their destruction. So what’s
inside this ancient library has largely remained a mystery since at least 79
AD.
That began to change in 2023, when citizen scientists responded to an online
challenge to see if any at-home geniuses could develop a way to render text
from a sample of X-ray scanned scrolls. They could—dozens of columns of it—by
using an AI-based technology that can detect ink patterns from the inside of a
rolled-up papyrus. That included the very first entire word read from the
inside of a Herculaneum scroll: “purple.”
I first wrote about the scrolls in this newsletter then, and again in May 2025,
when dozens of them were on their way to France to be scanned in high, high,
high definition (that’s not an exaggeration; the scanning requires a particle
accelerator). At the time, I wrote, “After the scanning comes the decoding,
which is slow going. No scroll has yet to be fully decoded.”
Until now! In late June, researchers announced that the first scroll, referred
to as
PHerc. 1667, had been virtually unwrapped and read in its entirety."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
