This appeared
last week:
Decoding the ancients buried by Vesuvius
By Rhys
Blakely
The Times
7:06AM
November 10, 2023
Luke
Farritor, a student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the US, was
walking home from a party a couple of months ago when his phone pinged.
In
a sense, he’d received a message from ancient Rome. Back in his college room
he’d left an artificial-intelligence system running on his computer. It was
analysing a relic of one of history’s most infamous natural disasters – a
papyrus scroll that had been transformed into brittle black charcoal when Mt
Vesuvius erupted in AD79 and the volcano swallowed up the town of Herculaneum
and the nearby city of Pompeii.
It
would be impossible to unroll the carbonised scroll without it crumbling in
your hands. Yet as Farritor, 21, peered at his smartphone screen, a fragment of
text from its inner layers – part of the word Greek word porphyras, which means
purple – was clearly visible. He had two reasons to be cheerful: he was the
first person to set eyes on the Greek characters in nearly 2000 years and he
had just won $US40,000 ($60,000) in a competition that may transform our
knowledge of antiquity.
The lost library
The
most splendid of all the properties entombed by the ash and rock unleashed by
Vesuvius was a sprawling summer home in Herculaneum, possibly built by Lucius
Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, a wealthy aristocrat and father-in-law to Julius
Caesar.
After
its discovery in 1750, the Villa of the Papyri was found to contain the largest
collection of classical sculpture ever seen in a single building. It also
boasted the only intact library we have from the Greco-Roman world. Hundreds,
possibly thousands, of scrolls have been preserved, but in a form that has been
unreadable.
During
the eruption, the scrolls were converted into withered ingots of pitch-black
carbon.
“They
look like lumps of coal,” says Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the
University of Kentucky, who has been working on how to read them for 18 years.
Painstaking
attempts were made to peel or scrape away layers of charred papyrus to read
their contents. But the process was destructive. Piece by piece, the library
was being obliterated.
For
poet William Wordsworth, as for generations of archaeologists, the carbonised
texts were fascinating and frustrating in equal measure. In September 1819 he
invokes the ruins of Herculaneum and speaks of longing to unroll just one
“precious, tender-hearted scroll”.
Robert
Fowler, a classicist at the University of Bristol, says: “My personal wishlist
would be the poetry of Sappho and some of the lost plays of Sophocles. And on
the Latin side, the lost books of Livy, the Annals of Aeneas.”
Pliny
the Elder, a Roman admiral and scholar who died during the eruption of Mt
Vesuvius, lived just across the Bay of Naples.
Richard
Carrier, a historian, has suggested the villa’s library may have kept a copy of
his lost History of Rome. Could it contain a lost Homeric epic? Unknown science
treatises? Works from Ovid? New letters from St Paul?
Fowler
says it would be amazing to find early Christian texts, adding: “It seems less
likely, but it’s true that the library was being added to in the first century
AD. It could transform what we know about antiquity.”
Reading a book you can’t open
The
quest to read the scrolls has been led recently by Seales, a pioneer in
computer imaging. In the 1990s Seales worked at the British Museum, helping to
make a digital copy of the earliest Beowulf manuscript, which had been damaged
by fire. It was largely unscathed but a conservator also showed him a medieval
codex that had been badly scorched before more harm was done by the water used
to extinguish the flames.
Seales
began to wonder: could it be possible to read works so badly deformed they
can’t be opened?
After
their discovery in the 18th century, Herculaneum scrolls occasionally were used
as diplomatic bargaining chips. The Bodleian Library at the University of
Oxford holds three.
In
2005 Seales travelled to Oxford to give a lecture. He suggested that the
scrolls be scanned using computed tomography, a form of X-ray. By studying CT
scans he believed it would be possible to distinguish the individual layers of
rolled-up papyrus. The scans also should show the ink. Software developed by
Seales then could be used to “flatten out” a virtual replica of a scroll,
rendering it legible.
In
2016 he led a team that tested this technique on the En-Gedi scroll, an ancient
carbonised parchment discovered in Israel in 1970. It worked beautifully,
revealing it to be the beginning of the Book of Leviticus.
Three
years later Seales gained access to two Herculaneum scrolls held by the
Institut de France in Paris. They were taken to Diamond Light Source, a
stadium-sized particle accelerator in Oxfordshire that produces a very fine,
powerful X-ray beam. This allowed minutely detailed 3D scans to be made.
But
the Herculaneum material represented a far tougher challenge. The ink used in
the En-Gedi scroll had contained a dense material, possibly a metal, that stood
out in X-ray images. By contrast the Herculaneum scribes had applied a
carbon-based ink to papyrus, itself plant-based – and therefore carbon-based –
material.
To
pick out the writing, carbon had to be distinguished from carbon. CT scans
alone could not do that. A new approach was needed.
It
came when a Silicon Valley investor picked up a children’s book about the
ancient world. Seales and his team used a particle accelerator to produce 3D
scans of the Herculaneum scrolls.
The prize master
Nat
Friedman’s previous roles have included being chief executive of Github, a
widely used platform for storing code and collaborating on software projects.
He explains how his interest in antiquity was kindled in 2020 when he read 24
Hours in Ancient Rome. It wasn’t long before he stumbled on Seales’s work and
the progress he had made in “flattening” the Herculaneum papyrus.
“I
found it shocking that there was this preserved but unrecoverable library,”
Friedman says.
If
the scrolls were not too badly damaged and the scans were of a high resolution,
he saw no reason why a form of AI known as machine learning could not be
trained to identify the ink.
He
tried to nudge wealthy individuals from Silicon Valley into funding Seales’s
work. When that failed he took another approach. Friedman has built his career
in the realm of open-source software, where code is shared and solutions are
hammered out by like-minded collaborators. He decided to launch a competition.
Friedman
chipped in $US100,000 towards the Vesuvius Challenge prize pot. His friend
Daniel Gross, a former head of machine learning at Apple, put in another
$US100,000. In total $US1.4m has been raised.
The
biggest single prize is $US700,000, the largest bounty of its kind in
archaeology, for identifying at least four separate passages of “continuous and
plausible text”, each at least 140 characters long. The deadline is December
31.
Smaller
prizes were offered for steps of progress. They included $US10,000 won by Casey
Handmer, a former NASA physicist. He realised the ink on the main scroll
resembled a charcoal banana and had a distinct texture.
More here:
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/the-times/decoding-the-ancients-buried-by-vesuvius/news-story/6215ccc37831fbd2e21ad42e7de7a2cd
I have nothing
to add – just great stuff…
David.
