Title of work deciphered in sealed Herculaneum scroll via digital unwrapping
94 comments
·May 11, 2025xpose2000
FirmwareBurner
"Video unavailable The uploader has not made this video available in your country"
So much for the global internet.
93po
probably similar video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_L1oN8y7Bs
deadbabe
VPN
sauerweb
This is really exciting. If you're not aware, the scrolls at Herculaneum are an entire pagan library from the first century. They're burned, hard to recover, mostly still buried. Being able to decode them without physically digging them up and damaging them is awesome.
Who knows what we could find. So many books have been lost.
philosophty
Seems a bit confusing to call it a "pagan library" when it's just the personal library of a very rich ancient Roman.
The ancient Roman elite often had extensive personal libraries which they shared with their friends, almost like a very primitive book publishing industry.
TrapLord_Rhodo
From the Christian, anyone who wasn't part of the Christian or Jewish faiths was considered pagan. In the first century CE, Epicureans were part of the broader category of Hellenistic pagan philosophers—which included Stoics, Platonists, and others—who were polytheistic or at least non-Christian. So since Philodemus makes up most of the library here, it's pretty safe to call it a "pagan" library.
tokai
But there is no reason to situate it in a Christian context. We are in a global multi religious community here. I could call your comment bad, supported by it being a trite semantic argument without relevancy for the subject. But that would do nothing to further the discussion here. Calling the library non-confucianist would be even more correct as Platonists are an important foundation for Christian thought. Though a completely useless labeling just as the pegan label.
philosophty
These people were non-Christian the same way they were non-Scientologists. They were unaware of Christianity and it had little to no impact on elite Romans by 79 AD.
"So since Philodemus makes up most of the library here, it's pretty safe to call it a "pagan" library."
You're confusing the tiny number of scrolls which have been preserved with what was likely in the complete library.
The complete library was much larger and likely contained the typical mix of philosophy, drama, poetry, and speeches copied over centuries from all over the Roman and Greek world.
lazide
In the first century CE, Christianity was barely on anyone’s radar. It’s indeed very odd to frame it this way?
detourdog
Would monotheistic be a more appropriate description of non-pagers?
I don’t know anything about paganism but it seems like if the grouping excludes Jews and Christians non-Christian describes Jews and pagans.
bawolff
In context its clear what is meant and that terminology has a long history.
Sure you could argue the terminology is very christian-centric, perhaps even offensive to pre-christian romans, but quite frankly that's a very uninteresting debate compared to the topic at hand.
andrepd
In the sense that the later Christian Romans were very very eager to lean on the good ol' book burning.
One of the reasons only a fraction of a percent of the classical texts reached our days is the fact that Christians suppressed those texts, directly (by destroying them) and indirectly (by closing the libraries and temples and institutions of learning which preserved those texts).
renewiltord
I actually find this strange tendency of online commenters to link something to their own obscure interest very amusing. It's been a classic for as long as I recall but I encountered another today which I thought was very entertaining where a commenter remarked that he only just realized that "Suno" is the Hindi word for what we'd say in Latin as "Audi". In Latin! Hahaha!
I have decided that I, too, shall use obscure things as benchmarks and references. It's pretty good fun. In this post-Ragnarok-Online world one can imagine we need more such milestones to judge other things by.
DoctorOetker
> Being able to decode them without physically digging them up and damaging them is awesome.
Can you provide some citations on the technology being used in situ without digging up? As far as I understood this is the application of technology widely popularized by the Herculaneum Challenge, where scrolls are still physically dug up, and x-rayed (which will slowly still damage the scrolls) but without physically breaking them open as was repeatedly attempted in the past.
I don't care much about the slow damage from x-rays: as long as the content is succesfully extracted, one can imagine little other use for the scrolls as is.
I mostly hope some lost works on mathematics will be recovered..
mattlondon
They have been dug up already. IIRC they have undergone extensive scanning over the years - X-Ray, CT etc - while not being unrolled.
So they have the scans of the rolled up scrolls, this is "just" (ha!) using the scan data with lots of algorithms and compute (AI? I presume so) to virtually unroll the scrolls and read the ink off the page.
bornfreddy
Actually, they are CT scanning them as the project continues. IIRC they reported about scanning a new (big) batch of them about a month ago.
You are right about not unrolling them though. Many scrolls were destroyed in previous attempts to unroll them physically, so it is fascinating to see how the technology has progressed to allow reading without unrolling.
qingcharles
And still plenty more to be dug up, allegedly.
martinpw
At the start of the article it links to a previous article on the scroll from February 2025 which has some more background details:
https://www.finebooksmagazine.com/fine-books-news/inside-her...
In particular this part:
Researchers are further refining the image using a new segmentation approach in the hopes that it will improve the coherence and clarity of the lines of text currently visible, and perhaps reach the end of the papyrus, the innermost part of the carbonised scroll, where the colophon with the title of the work may be preserved.
So the new article is indicating they were able now to decipher the title, and also indicates maybe why the title was not the first thing deciphered (presumably it is hardest to read the innermost parts.)
I'm curious why the title is in the inside of the scroll. That implies you have to completely open it to read the title - is that the way scrolls are usually written?
wizzwizz4
If you're rolling the scroll up as you read (or, I guess, write) it, you'll leave it rolled up like that. I presume you're expected to rewind the tape before you return it, if you borrowed it from somebody else.
qoez
This is awesome but I get so worried that we're just hallucinating meaning in those little splotches.
NitpickLawyer
> Both images were independently reviewed by the Vesuvius Challenge papyrological team, led by Federica Nicolardi. The simultaneous reproduction of the title image from multiple sources, along with independent scholarly review, provides a high degree of confidence in the reading.
You have 2 teams using the same data, getting to the same conclusion. You also have an author that's known from other sources, with writings that we already "have". Then you have a team of experts reviewing this. Chances are these are real findings and not "hallucinations". Not everything in ML is gen-ai...
LegionMammal978
To add to this, the main ML parts, as I understand it, are for the initial unrolling of layers, and for the detection of ink vs. no-ink (the position of the 'splotches'). Both of these are trained and calibrated from human observations.
All interpretation of ink as Greek letters is done purely by human inference. This may lead to errors, especially in parts where the ink is preserved especially poorly or where the text is totally different from expectations, but it would be classic human error instead of AI hallucination.
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thaumasiotes
> You have 2 teams using the same data, getting to the same conclusion.
> You also have an author that's known from other sources, with writings that we already "have".
> Then you have a team of experts reviewing this.
Only the first of those points is evidence against the result being hallucinated.
suddenlybananas
>You also have an author that's known from other sources, with writings that we already "have".
Well, that's exactly what you'd expect from a hallucination no? If the model is overfit enough on the relevant corpus, a title that already exists should be much more likely.
LegionMammal978
The ML models are looking at tiny patches for areas of ink vs. no-ink, trained on the boundaries of more visible letters found by humans. They don't know what proper Greek letters look like, and they definitely don't know what correct Greek words would be (in particular, they have no "corpus" of words). Any possible overfitting is ordinary human overfitting.
bornfreddy
We are not. This is more forensics (using ML to learn what the clues are) than "AI".
FlyingSnake
> Philodemus was an Epicurean philosopher and poet from Gadara whose ethical teachings emphasise the pursuit of pleasure as central to a good life. He argued against rigid logic and formal rhetoric, believing that philosophy should serve practical human happiness rather than abstract intellectual debate.
As a layman admirer of Epicurean thought, I’m so glad that even after so many wars, destruction and tragedy over the centuries, such wonderful works have survived.
helsinki
Brent Seales was my second CS professor and taught me how to do OOP in C++. It’s always cool to randomly see the work he’s done every few months. He was working on this project nearly twenty years ago.
ashoeafoot
This really is a herculean act. bravo. my condolences to all those archeology students who will never brush ash away with the same carelessness as before today. Is it really worth digging destructively ?
popctrl
This is so cool
As a history nerd and jaded software developer, I've been wondering a lot lately how I can use my tech skills for archeological research. Is there any way for someone with most of a bachelors to get into this kind of thing?
worewood
My experience with academia is that most of this hard work is done by undergrads, and conception and management by professors; developers aren't hired to do this. So besides "going back to school", there's no way in for an outsider.
bornfreddy
Well, they are hiring [0]. Sounds like a great way to start. Or you can join the Vesuvius Challenge if you prefer competing.
verditelabs
They say they're hiring but I didn't even get an email back about my application and I've been awarded $20k through the vesuvius challenge and have 10 years experience in the exact job they're hiring for so I really don't know what they're looking for or if they're looking that hard.
blackstache
Sorry to hear this happened as this shouldn't have been lost. I'll make sure we get in touch with you.
webdevver
they say they deciphered it - ok, so what does it say!? the most important information is omitted... so annoying.
number6
The Greek writing visible in the image reads: ΦΙΛΟΔΗΜΟΥ ΠΕΡΙ ΦΥΣΕΩΣ This translates into English as: Of Philodemus, On Nature
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throwanem
They identified it by title as a copy of a known work. This information appears very early in the article.
renewiltord
It is not very common to find pre-Kanishka works. I hope that we get some insight into human lives around this time. One of the things I find fascinating about ancient times is how similar humans of then were to us. Akrotiri (similarly preserved by volcanic eruption) was millennia before even the works in this discovery and yet seemed strangely familiar and normal when visiting.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
> Using ‘virtual unwrapping’, the scroll PHerc. 172 which is housed at the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford has been identified as On Vices by the Greek philosopher Philodemus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philodemus
Neat
null
There is a PBS documentary about this very thing and how it got started. Very cool and worth the watch. Needless to say, the researcher had quite a few hurdles to overcome.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw44V49Fz9U