An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time(scrollprize.org) |
An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time(scrollprize.org) |
have any attempts (or just ideas) been made to recreate such charring on known texts?
The team did "the campfire scroll" experiment a few years ago to replicate carbonization, unrolling, and ink detection. That is the only case I am aware of. It proved the method could work but it's not a source of say training data; it varies too much from the real scrolls.
The main limitation is time and cost. We have to scan on what is AFAIK the most powerful x-ray beam line in the world. It is not cheap
For iron gall ink with high enough iron concentration, the ink stands out in the xray volume through simply masking off low values, such as was shown in our campfire scroll experiment a few years ago. No herculaneum scrolls show similar ink.
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 should be neutral and always value new evidence. Scientists as humans are unfortunately subject to all sorts of passions.
So imagine how cool it would be to find a full library with thousand of scrolls across many different topics, that can now be read with this technology.
It's also well known that surviving texts survived because they were copied again and again on costly animal skin during the Middle Ages, by monks who had to make a choice and naturally favored topics that were of most interest to them.
This could quite literally change everything.
[0] https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2021/09/25/are-there-more-...
A Post-Great Solar Flare of 2484 Step Brothers DVD Has Been Decoded
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.
How much of the translators bias makes these seem like academic papers instead of social media posts.
There are lots of very smart folks working on incredible things, they just aren't as loud.
You mean ropes and carts?
But really impressive stuff! Between this and (a particularly optimistic outlook on) the Linear-A news from the other week this is an exciting time for linguistics.
A thought: I guess the days of scratch off lottery tickets are numbered?
Apparently they did CT scans of closed books and read the content. Polevoy, Dmitry V., et al. "From tomographic reconstruction to automatic text recognition: the next frontier task for the artificial intelligence." Fifteenth International Conference on Machine Vision (ICMV 2022). Vol. 12701. SPIE, 2023. https://iris.unive.it/bitstream/10278/3687069/1/Albertin_et-...
So yeah, but lottery companies probably make it harder by engineering against it.
Beautifully ironic, that we find this message.
I love stuff like this because it gives a glimpse into Roman society. To me it seems like they were very similar to us today, forever contemplating learning, existence, gods.
Emphasis mine.
Amazing!
Fantastic work!
(Btw, you can use the 'edit' link to fix things like this if the software gets a title change wrong.)
They are in a variety of conditions - some of them people were able to "break" open and read. But the vast majority of what remains is too delicate and brittle to risk.
For anyone who wants to read ancient texts, there are bilingual editions, for example those of the "Loeb library".
The translations that omit the original text are just for the people who want to have some idea about the content, but do not care about the correctness of the translation.
With a bilingual edition, it is easy to understand the original text even with relatively little knowledge about the original language.
The original text is important because frequently the translator is forced to introduce inaccuracies in the translation, because of the absence of exact equivalents in the target language, which would require a long explanation of the original meaning, instead of just a translated sentence.
Especially misleading are translations where several distinct ancient words are translated using the same English word, so some nuances are lost.
Equally confusing are the cases when the translator chooses to translate the same ancient word by different English words, because even if the meaning of a word may depend on the context, many translators fail to judge correctly the context, because they may lack specialized knowledge so their guesses are not necessarily better than of the readers who may be less competent in linguistics, but more competent in the science or technology needed to understand the context. Better translators prefer to use a one-to-one mapping between words, which makes it easier for the readers to discover the meaning intended by the ancient writer, after seeing multiple examples of usage.
While I step through the valley of the shadow of death,
I contemplate my life and perceive that nothing remains.
For I have hurled weapons and laughed for so long that
Even to my mother, my mind appears to have departed.
Yet I have deceived no one except him who was worthy of it;
For me to be held as a coward—that indeed is unheard of.
Beware what you speak and where you set out,
Lest you and your companions be outlined in chalk.
Latin is also a very rich language and this is no snippet.
Translation is always hard, especially from a couple thousand years ago BUT this kind of translation comes with a lot of confidence.
* ἐκ- = “out,” “thoroughly,” “to the end”
* πονέω = “to labor,” “to toil,” “to work hard”
Ah, the good old bitter lesson strikes again
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Richards
Congratulations, and thank-you!
It's easy to just read about the breakthrough and see it as one neat, linear line to get there, and hard to comprehend the hours, months and years that so many spent to get there. Big congrats to you, Sean, Nat and the entire team!
Major kudos to all of you on your achievements! This is amazing work for anthropology and for society, and it's greatly appreciated.
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 even being collected in Monasteries. Herculaneum could represent a legitimate treasure trove in that regard.
So we can just get ChatGPT to fill in the blanks.
A stable base corpus and some dynamic programming will allow you to clean up the remainder[0].
I am, though, not a papyrologist, so historical ink making, preparation, and usage are not my field.
Any master stoneworker from any era should be able to carve stone to that level of precision given enough time and reason. The problem, as always, is that there is usually very little reason to put in that amount of time and effort when you can get 90% as good for 50% the effort.
I was under the impression that there was almost nothing left of that school of thought, and that it’s writings had been destroyed.
What would you like to have instead?
