ROME — Hundreds of papyrus documents buried in the ash after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. have hidden secrets for centuries. However, archaeologists were able to decipher some of the ancient documents with the help of artificial intelligence.
The Herculaneum Papyrus, discovered in the ruins of a villa thought to have belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, is among approximately 1,000 scrolls that were carbonized during the eruption, along with thousands of other artifacts. It is a collection consisting of.
It was named after the site where it was discovered and buried by farm workers in the 18th century, Herculaneum, an ancient Roman town south of Pompeii that was also destroyed by bombing.
Previous attempts to uncover its secrets have failed, as most of the scrolls have been reduced to carbonized ash and shattered. However, many of them were painstakingly expanded over several decades by monks and were found to contain philosophical works written in Greek.
“Until now, the only way to read the contents of the Herculaneum scrolls was to put together thousands of disparate fragments,” Richard Janko, distinguished professor of classics at the University of Michigan, told NBC. Thursday news.
“It’s like putting together a mosaic, and not many people want to do that,” he added. “So it might take 500 years to decipher its contents. Using this technique, it should be easier and faster.”
This breakthrough came after a global competition was launched to promote text reading. The Vesuvius Challenge offered a $1 million prize to anyone who could solve the problem and find a way to read his remaining 270 closed scrolls. Most of it is preserved in a library in Naples, about 13 miles west of Herculaneum.
It was launched by a team at the University of Kentucky, led by Professor Brent Shields, with the hope that worldwide research groups would pick up the work, along with software, three papyrus fragments and two rolled scrolls. Thousands of 3D X-ray images were released. Challenge.
Shields’ team had already pioneered a way to “virtually unravel” ancient scrolls from Israel using X-ray tomography and computer vision. But even that wasn’t enough to read the barely visible ink written on the Herculaneum manuscripts.
“The chemistry of ancient ink is different from the chemistry of the Middle Ages. It’s almost invisible to the naked eye, even if it’s captured by X-rays,” he says. “But we know that tomography can give us information about the ink.”
“In 2019, we came up with a solution based on artificial intelligence that allows us to ‘see’ ink, but it required a lot of data and a small team. So we took on the challenge of scaling up our processes and accelerating our work,” he added.
A total of 18 teams participated in the competition, and the best results were sent to an international team of papyrus scholars to evaluate the readability of each entry and transcribe the text.
In the end, the judges, including Janco, decided that a team of three students – Luke Fariter from the United States, Youssef Nader from Egypt, and Julian Siliger from Switzerland – won the grand prize of $700,000. decided to share.
After training a machine learning algorithm on the scanned images, the three were able to read 2,000 characters from the scroll. After creating her 3D scan of the text using a CT scan, the scroll was divided into segments. A machine learning model, an application of AI, was able to detect the inked areas and decipher the text.
After the winners were announced earlier this week, one of the contest’s sponsors, Nat Friedman, told social media platform I wrote that it was completed. It’s at the end of the first scroll.
“The author – probably the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus – is writing here about how to enjoy music, food and the pleasures of life,” he says. In the final section, the author casts a shadow on an unnamed ideological adversary, perhaps the Stoics. — They “have nothing to say about joy, either in general or in particular.”
Giancarlo del Mastro, professor of papyrus at the Luigi Vanvitelli University of Campania in Naples, called the technique “revolutionary.”
“We were surprised,” said Del Mastro, who is also a judge for the Vesuvius Challenge. “We literally worked day and night interpreting the papyrus, but what’s even more exciting is that we can use this method to uncover what has been hidden in the papyrus for almost 2,000 years.”
