[HN Gopher] Title of work deciphered in sealed Herculaneum scrol...
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Title of work deciphered in sealed Herculaneum scroll via digital
unwrapping
Author : namanyayg
Score : 165 points
Date : 2025-05-11 14:02 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.finebooksmagazine.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.finebooksmagazine.com)
| sauerweb wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| flir wrote:
| > Calling the library non-confucianist would be even more
| correct as Platonists are an important foundation for
| Christian thought.
|
| Epicureans aren't Platonists. We know that the library
| went heavy on Epicurean texts.
|
| The word "pagan" is still used by Classicists today.
| bawolff wrote:
| There is a reason to situate it in a roman context. Rome
| eventually becomes christianized and it makes sense to
| talk about before and after that. Obviously the old still
| influences the new, its not a hard line, but it is a
| major change in roman society.
| _bin_ wrote:
| Wrong. This is essentially the context in which we still
| live today though we've secularized substantially over
| the past centuries. But Rome was on the path to
| Christianity at this time and later converted, so this is
| a very common way to understand things. Generally a work
| is one of a few things: Christian, Jewish, maybe Muslim
| depending on whom you ask, as it's also an Abrahamic
| faith, or Pagan.
|
| To be honest this feels more like you have an axe to
| grind with Christianity or its dominance, similar to the
| people pushing for "BCE/CE" over BC/AD. I don't know why,
| but don't expect the rest of the world to carry that
| cross for you.
| Arainach wrote:
| When a scientist in India publishes a study, we don't
| call it a "pagan" study.
|
| The word "pagan" adds nothing to the original post. "An
| entire library from the first century" conveys just as
| much information.
| _bin_ wrote:
| Indian studies were not part of the world of classical
| antiquity and you know it. Nobody is calling them pagan.
| And no, stripping that descriptor removes information
| from the statement.
| Arainach wrote:
| Is there evidence of a single significant Christian
| library from the first century?
| kiba wrote:
| To be honest, adding the word "pagan" just seem
| needlessly divisive. When I read about the past, nobody
| is going out of their way to point out that it's Pagan.
| griffzhowl wrote:
| > This is essentially the context in which we still live
| today
|
| Who's "we"? - It doesn't apply to everyone in the world,
| so you're assuming some limitations in who you're
| referring to.
|
| GP makes a fair point. If you mean by "pagan" simply non-
| Christian and non-Jewish, then to make it relevant to
| call it a pagan library you would need to establish that
| it was curated specifically to exclude Christain or
| Jewish themes. You might as well call it a "non-Mithraic
| library", if it happens to exclude mention of Mithras,
| which was also an up-and-coming cult among the Romans in
| the first century. Then it would be incorrect or
| presumptious to call it "non-Mithraic", unless you'd
| first established that it contained no mention of
| Mithras. And the only reason you'd do that is if Mithras
| held a particular parochial relevance to you. You
| understand that not everyone holds up an image of Mithras
| as a prism through which to view everything else.
|
| OTOH, if you mean by "pagan" just that it's Roman, but
| from before Rome converted to Christianity, then just say
| it's a first century Roman library.
| _bin_ wrote:
| America, which is the center of world power and culture.
| You may not like that but that doesn't make it untrue.
| It's also where most users of this site live.
|
| GP does not make a fair point. We're specifically talking
| about classical antiquity which was a fairly bounded
| world. Warrior god cults, like that of Mithras, didn't
| have a strong role in the overall state and direction of
| the empire. They weren't major players and it is actually
| perfectly fine for terminology and understanding to focus
| on those.
|
| Christianity _is_ the prism through which the Romans
| later viewed things and through which the heirs of
| classical antiquity did. This isn 't parochial, this
| reflects your general dislike of Christianity's
| dominance. But I don't actually have to make a normative
| argument that it should be, just the positive point that
| it is.
|
| "Pagan" is a widely-accepted way to refer to Rome's old
| polytheistic religious traditions, which existed, but not
| unchallenged, around the first century.
| TrapLord_Rhodo wrote:
| You are right.
|
| it's just that the romans themselves had an identity
| crisis of "pagan" vs. "monothestic". So yes, you are
| right to call out the fact that situating it in the
| christian context would be follie.
|
| But the original point still stands. Calling it pagan is
| still a correct classification of the works in the
| library.
| duskwuff wrote:
| I mean, part of what makes this library interesting is
| that nearly all of the classical Greek and Latin texts we
| have access to have been passed through the filter of
| generations of Christian monks copying those texts. Being
| able to see what these texts looked like without that
| filter is inherently interesting.
| philosophty wrote:
| 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.
| JoBrad wrote:
| So is the "pagan" moniker a way of dating the work to
| before the rise of Christianity with the Roman Empire?
| colechristensen wrote:
| To put it simply, "pagan" was a Christian insult towards
| non-Christians. It is not a reasonable description for
| anything unless you're in a very Christian context, and
| even then viewing it from a modern context "pagan" is a
| bit of a slur.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Just because a slur happens to be the same word as a
| technical term doesn't mean it can't be used as a
| technical term anymore. Anyone working in the field or
| had awareness of it knows the appropriate connotation.
|
| It causes me physical pain when scientists change their
| practice to appease pearl clutching amateurs
| colechristensen wrote:
| It's not a technical term, calling things that aren't
| Christian "pagan" especially from before Christianity was
| prominent is silly and inaccurate.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C44&q=
| %22...
| philosophty wrote:
| https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%5Bpre+-+Ch
| ris...
|
| Clearly modern scholars disagree with you, and it's not a
| matter of pearl clutching.
|
| It just doesn't make sense to, for example, define an
| ancient Roman library as "pagan" (or even "pre-
| Christian") as if that is its defining characteristic.
| Unless you happen to be a medieval Christian monk of
| course, and then it makes complete sense.
| Aloisius wrote:
| Uh. The first page of that seems to consist entirely of
| articles about Christians and their views of the ancient
| Greeks except for one article on neo-Paganism.
|
| If anything, that seems to prove people's point that the
| term is of questionable value, except perhaps when
| discussing early Christians or I suppose if one is
| writing about Christianity.
| pizzafeelsright wrote:
| I wouldn't say it's an insult so much as a catch all.
| Romans could worship any and many gods. Rome being a hub
| also included foreign religions.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Romans were polytheistic and didn't really have a _name_
| for their religion, nor did they think of it collectively
| as one thing separate from other religions, though very
| occasionally a set of practices might be referred to as
| what translates to "the Roman religion". Separate
| religions is really more of a monotheism thing. "Pagan"
| wasn't ever a self-identifying thing until well after the
| Christians took over and called them that for a long
| time.
|
| "Foreign religions" weren't really much of a thing
| either, there were lots of gods and each village and city
| (and family really) would have their own versions of
| gods. Sometimes when you'd conquer a city you'd go to the
| most prominent temple and steal the statue or alter or
| whatever and bring it back to Rome with the vibe that you
| were stealing the god of the place you conquered.
| TrapLord_Rhodo wrote:
| it was not an insult. They called themselves pagans.
| There was a civil war or two in rome with Pagans on one
| side, and monotheism on the other. They used the term
| pagan, as in the "old ways". Many people died to decide
| the fact of whether "Rome" was going to continue as
| pagan, or convert to monotheism under the Kai Row.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >They used the term pagan, as in the "old ways"
|
| That's not what the latin origin of pagan ever meant, it
| meant peasant or rural usually in the negative
| connotation common for city folks referring to people who
| lived outside of cities\\. Were there ever _any_ recorded
| instances of Romans referring to themselves as "pagan"
| as a group? Maybe one.
|
| >"Rome"
|
| Weird usage of scare quotes, especially in the time frame
| you are referring to, the name of the empire or the city
| was never ambiguous.
| wood_spirit wrote:
| Christianity had a really transformative impact on the
| Roman world so it makes sense to classify texts as pre
| and post Christianity. The date - literally BC and AD -
| don't work so scholars have for a very long time
| clarified by calling the pre-Christian "pagan".
| detourdog wrote:
| 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.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Abrahamic (= worshipping the God of Abraham) is the word
| I've most often seen used.
| detourdog wrote:
| That works for me but I'm still curious what a pagan is.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Anyone who disobeys Abrahamic "ten" commandments 0, 1
| and/or 2 (depending how you count them) - that is, anyone
| who does not worship the Abrahamic God as the first and
| foremost deity.
|
| I'm not sure whether atheists count as pagans. (Buddhists
| _probably_ are...? But really, the term was designed for
| the religious practices of southern and (north-)western
| Europe that the early-ish Christian church wanted to wipe
| out.)
| detourdog wrote:
| Thank you. This is a nice concise answer. The best part
| is geo-location of the term.
| TrapLord_Rhodo wrote:
| yes, it would. Monotheistic would be a much better term
| as that's how the people at the time viewed the divide.
| bawolff wrote:
| 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| andrepd wrote:
| 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).
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| qingcharles wrote:
| And still plenty more to be dug up, allegedly.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| 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.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| > 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
| qoez wrote:
| This is awesome but I get so worried that we're just
| hallucinating meaning in those little splotches.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > 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...
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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.
| anabab wrote:
| If they have learned on ink areas shaped as letters, what
| prevents them from having a bias towards such shapes?
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| Because they don't get to see the entire letter shapes.
| The page at [0] shows the basic idea: they're forced to
| make decisions based on each part of each stroke of the
| letter. If they were heavily overfitting on the strokes
| of the letters in the training sample, then they'd be so
| inaccurate outside the sample that the assembled outputs
| would hardly resemble letters at all, much less words.
|
| (Also, this is heavily-damaged handwriting, not clear
| print, so each letter isn't even uniform in shape. A
| model trying to cheat at ink detection would have an
| uphill battle trying to guess what all the variant letter
| shapes might be.)
|
| [0] https://scrollprize.org/grandprize#how-accurate-are-
| these-pi...
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| 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.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| We are not. This is more forensics (using ML to learn what the
| clues are) than "AI".
| webdevver wrote:
| they say they deciphered it - ok, so what does it say!? the most
| important information is omitted... so annoying.
| throwanem wrote:
| They identified it by title as a copy of a known work. This
| information appears very early in the article.
| number6 wrote:
| The Greek writing visible in the image reads: PhILODEMOU PERI
| PhUSEOS This translates into English as: Of Philodemus, On
| Nature
| seydor wrote:
| PERI KAKION A
|
| About vices - part A
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| xpose2000 wrote:
| 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
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _" Video unavailable The uploader has not made this video
| available in your country"_
|
| So much for the global internet.
| deadbabe wrote:
| VPN
| 93po wrote:
| probably similar video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_L1oN8y7Bs
| martinpw wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| popctrl wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Well, they are hiring [0]. Sounds like a great way to start. Or
| you can join the Vesuvius Challenge if you prefer competing.
|
| [0] https://scrollprize.org/jobs
| verditelabs wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Sorry to hear this happened as this shouldn't have been
| lost. I'll make sure we get in touch with you.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| 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 ?
| helsinki wrote:
| 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.
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