An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

I am on the vesuvius challenge team that did the segmentation, unwrapping, and ink detection, so feel free to ask any questions.

Lets reflect on Aristocreon, in about 200 BC, putting their thoughts down on a scroll. They would be aware that the scroll might be kept in a library for some time. Maybe they could have imagined it surviving for 300 years. But they never would have imagined that in 300 years a volcano might destroy the scroll, but in some way preserve it. And then that nearly two thousand years later future humans with machines made of materials unimaginable to Aristocreon, but related distantly to sand and lightning, would be able to read the scroll again and instantly transmit it to nearly the whole planet, a planet with many times more humans than existed in their time. (and speaking of 'planet', in Aristocreon's time, people had fairly recently been able to show that the world was spherical but much of it was still unknown).

Do we have better imaginations? Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?

Every time you feel depressed by the state of tech, and how so many intelligent people seem to work on forcing ever more ads down people's throats (a common trope around these parts), remember that projects like this do exist too!

There are lots of very smart folks working on incredible things, they just aren't as loud.

Only about 20% of the Herculaneum site has been excavated, so there is high probability that more scrolls exist. The current scrolls were not part of the main library, but more of a private collection at the time.

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.

Did anyone notice that anonymous donators[1] have the picture of Larry David, and the link points to the Curb Your Enthusiasm - Anonymous Donor Pt2[2] episode?

So geeky, so cool !

- [1] https://scrollprize.org/#sponsors

- [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqrJ4wGid4Y

I wonder what the parellel would be 2,000 years for now:

A Post-Great Solar Flare of 2484 Step Brothers DVD Has Been Decoded

Ex-project lead here. The most incredible part is buried in a 7 hour long video. Last night they also unwrapped 140 columns of new text in the PHerc. Paris. 4 scroll: https://x.com/JanPaul123/status/2070304769273725278

For me, this is one of the most exciting things being done with AI right now. (This and medical research)

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.

When I read translations like these, I always wonder if the tone is translated. Did the writer mean to convey a very formal “to the utmost”, or was it a more casual “to the max”.

How much of the translators bias makes these seem like academic papers instead of social media posts.

The person who wrote this was was closer in time to the technology that was able to unwind and read burned fragments of their text, than the technology that build the pyramids. pretty wild to think about.

What if we want to put something on paper today for it to survive as long as possible?

1-minute research:

Paper: 100% cotton rag or linen rag paper with alkaline reserve. Acid-free and lignin-free.

Ink: Genuine carbon ink applied with a classic dip pen.

Storage: ISO 16245 archival box, Less than 15°C, 30-50% humidity, dark, no oxygen exchange. Always store horizontally. Wear white 100% cotton gloves.

Printing: If you want to print instead of hand-write: Piezography carbon printing or pigment-based inks used by professional desktop photo printers, matte black or photo black ink, printed on digital Fine Art Archival Paper.

Place a single sheet of archival-grade tissue paper or glassine paper between every single page of your document

I think the key is to write something interesting that's worth preserving. That may be the most difficult part.

Any improvements beyond this?

> "…we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature…"

Beautifully ironic, that we find this message.

I'm a big fan of the Vesuvius challenge (and Graeco-Roman history/philosophy) but I'm not convinced if the effort justifies the reward here, relative to other pockets of ancient writings we can use technology for reading and archiving.

We have large volumes of clay tablets from Mesopotamia that pre-date these papyri and are considerably easier to read that get nowhere near the attention. E.g. the library of Ashurbanipal.

Several reasons are at play I suppose - the excitement and the drama are much higher with this. But I think the West's obsession with the Graeco-Roman world is also a major factor.

Very impressive! I also highly recommend visiting Herculaneum.

A thought: I guess the days of scratch off lottery tickets are numbered?

I imagine it's not the first time, It must've at least been proofread at the time of writing :)

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.

> "we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature, and besides, in the same way as the remaining arts may be said to be perfected in one respect, but to be deficient in practical wisdom in another respect"

- Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8 Year 0. Ish. :}

So cool! Congratulations to the team. When scroll 4 (PHerc 1667) was first published, it was clear that the sheets were less compressed than the first two scrolls, so it would be easier to segment the surface. However, the whole surface looked similar to what the ink had looked like in scroll 1 where letters were first discovered.

But the team persevered and scanned at higher resolutions and eventually found letters: https://scrollprize.substack.com/p/finallyletters-in-scroll-...

Now they've managed to bring out the ink across the whole scroll. Truly inspiring, can't wait to read up on how they did it.

Whats the message in it. Can't find link to it.

Looks like it's some phylosophical rambling, I can imagine the dudes sitting in their mediterranean garden and theoretizing about life. It's practically the Reddit post of 200BC.

“…we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature…”

“Having…strained ourselves to the utmost through research and learning…possessing the same practical wisdom…”

“…such being the goods for us, even from the opposite evils there will be neither anything good — let alone beautiful — nor anything bad — let alone ugly — nor happiness…”

> sealed since the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, has been virtually unwrapped and read from beginning to end.

Take that, floppydisk!

The anti-dig faction of the archelogy internal war grows ever bolder and cursive.

> PHerc. 1667 is what survives of a larger roll: earlier attempts to open it by hand — in the nineteenth century, and again in 1969 and the 1980s — destroyed its outer layers and left only the compact inner core, about 8 cm of an original height of 19–24 cm.

I can understand in the freewheeling days of the 19th century, but I'm rather surprised that they'd be so cavalier in the 70s and 80s...

Press release from ESRF: https://www.esrf.fr/home/news/general/content-news/general/t...

What an incredible test against human capability and optimism to preserve them for so long in hopes that we would one day have to tech to read them without destroying them. Stories like these give me a lot of hope for the future.

270 years sitting in a museum and ML cracks it in a few years. Makes you wonder how many other 'unreadable' artifacts are just waiting for the right model."

Link to the image: https://scrollprize.org/img/firstscroll/banner-full.webp

So far this is some of the best uses of ML I've seen to date! This is one of the few things you can point at and say "AI made the world a better place" IMO (this and medical research).

Been following the vesuvius challenge and to me this is nothing short of alien magic tech. Incredible work.

But wait, the work seems to be from the 2nd century, but it was buried during the Vesuvius eruption in the 1st century?

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.

When will the rest be scanned and incorporated into the LLM training corpus?

amazing work deserves much better than this dreadful llm write up!

Let’s normalize not using AI for blog posts. This is cool but I feel like I’m interacting with Claude Code. Em dashes, bolding, “it’s not just x, it’s y”

This is so cool. I feel like it is almost a victory against entropy!

It's false that the 'entire Herculaneum scroll has been read'. Much of the scroll has been lost. From the preprint, columns 1-4 lost, and then margins on other columns are also lost.

   Col. 5: "… the similar …"
   
   Col. 6: "… impulses …"
   
   Col. 9: "… so far as … this or to have … that …"
   
   Col. 10: "… that befits on the whole still … there will be fear and … the great and long …"
   
   Col. 11: "… and the impulse … For/towards each of these things in this way … we are by nature … and for/towards the fulfillment of these things that … seem …"
   
   Col. 12: "… to men and beasts … And above all, each of the most common things constitutes these … For, [necessity? necessary?] …"
   
   Col. 13: "… natural … therefore also … according to the … this … will be found, and lives will make no progress whatsoever, as we have no need for either pleasure or pain. In the same way, also …"
   
   Col. 14: "… and thus lacking … I want to say … common … accomplished … to lack … and … on the right parts towards the left ones. There is an excess in the impulse …"
   
   Col. 15: "… and of all similar things. For, according to this kind/category, according to which impulses exist by nature, there will be that which lacks nothing, so that one seeks nothing more, but completes in every respect as …"
   
   Col. 16: "… they approach completion. Moving from these things to … [λόγος?], it [τέχνη?] accomplishes within us all that pertains to it, even though it cannot fully complete nature. And it allowed …"
   
   Col. 17: "… we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature, and besides, in the same way as the remaining arts may be said to be perfected in one respect, but to be deficient in practical wisdom in another respect…"
   
   Col. 18: "… being that practical wisdom … and to be about it. This [sc. λόγος] concerning the mechanical arts seems to me to be very distant from such a [conception?], and to have the technical fulfilment that is, so to speak, lame and something of such type lacking, and concerning the …"
   
   Col. 19: "… need none. Having certainly strained ourselves to the utmost through research and learning, we will no longer be inferior to them in any respect, accomplishing in like manner the things that befit them and possessing the same practical wisdom as they …"
   
   Col. 20: "… to happen. And such being the goods for us, even from the opposite evils there will be neither anything good—let alone beautiful—nor anything bad—let alone ugly—nor happiness …"
   
   Col. 21: "… being greatly wise and celebrated and … to praise … as according to the eulogies …"
   
   Col. 22: "… still … Aristocreon … to possessed things …"

Didn't they watch enough Mummy movies to know not to do that

How much of this work is "with 5 parameters I can fit an elephant"?

This is technology verging on witchcraft!

Amazing!

Where is the direct English translation? I don't care about anything else.

A scroll has been read ... what does it say ?

Was this announcement AI-generated?

Was this page human-written, or AI-generated?

This is so beautiful in a way, like going back in time and saving someone from dying, their words are now back into history.

In a way this is sort of like the reverse of a recently aired anime (Orb: on the movements of the Earth) which talk about the opposite, people whose contributions were erased and we'll never know about them.

I thought we were able to read some of these scrolls years ago?

Kind of cool. The eruption sort of "froze" some information in time, for later generations to learn from people living ~2000 years in the past.

How long till someone uses the hardware and code to process all the redacted data in the epstein files. Why wait thousands of years?

I'm really hoping that the library contains some lost older Greek works. But its going to be awesome what ever we find.

what does it say?

A Herculaneum effort.

"We've been trying to contact you about your extended chariot warranty"

This is huge, we're about to learn so much about ancient texts.

Scrolls from Herculaneum have been read for a very long time. Not disputing the achievement of digitally unrolling one, but the scrolls from the library of have been studied since the 18th century.

"I'm gonna have to science the shit out of this."

Fantastic work!

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