London – Herculaneum Scrolls For almost two thousand years, it has remained one of many fascinating mysteries in the ancient world. Burned to lava burning from Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, the frequency of a winding up papyrus was discovered in the mansion of Herculaneum, an ancient Roman town near Pompeii. Both towns were destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius, and most of the scrolls were burnt so badly that it was impossible to open.
Over the next two and a half centuries, he tried to spread some of the hundreds of scrolls using everything from rose water and mercury to vegetable gases and papyrus juice.
What was opened was a philosophical textbook written in ancient Greek. However, most of the scrolls were considered indecipherable because they were so badly damaged. More recently, researchers I managed to decipher it Several selected words using artificial intelligence, x-rays, and CT scans to distinguish between printed papyrus and ink.
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The mystery is still unraveling, and a major breakthrough was announced on Wednesday. Researchers say they were able to now unfold digitally and begin reading one of the ancient scrolls. It is known as the scroll in question, PEREC. 172 is one of three stored at the Bodrian Library at the University of Oxford in the UK.
The teams involved in the Vesuvius Challenge are a race to offer prize money to those who can help unlock delicate scrolls, and to reveal a column of texts Oxford scholars are already beginning to decipher Papyrus. It is said to have practically wrapped around it.
“The scroll contains more recoverable text than we’ve seen in scanned Herculaneum scrolls,” said Brent Seales, one of the co-founders of The Challenge.
“We’re sure we can read most of the whole scroll, and this is the first time we’ve really been able to say it with confidence,” Project lead Stephen Parsons said CBS News News told the BBC partner network. “Now we can work on making it look more clearer. We’re going from a handful of words to a really substantive sentence.”
The breakthrough came when a team from the Bodleian Library brought a blackened scroll to a nearby Diamond Light Source Research Facility in Oxfordshire. Relics without damaging it.
“You can see things on a scale of a thousandths of millimeters,” Adrian Mankuso, director of the facility’s physical sciences, told the BBC. “You need to resolve a layer that is different from the next layer, so you can deploy it digitally.”
Last year, the Vesuvius Challenge announcement Three young students had won the $700,000 grand prize for using AI to help researchers read about 5% of another scroll. Its subject was Greek Epicurean philosophy.
The scrolls that the Bodleian Library team has recently been unfolding are assumed to be in the same subject.
“I love the connections to those who gathered them, those who wrote them, those who wrote them, those who placed them on the shelves,” said Nicole Gilroy, book protection officer at the Bodrian Library. I talked. “It has a real human side to it, and I think it’s really valuable.”
