From invisibility to readability: Recovering the ink of Herculaneum | Hacker News Reader

From invisibility to readability: Recovering the ink of Herculaneum

journals.plos.org

39 pointsdiodorus8 comments

Oh, cool to see this here! I am one of the authors of the paper, I can answer questions later today.

>In fact, no identifiable, readable text has been recovered from inside a closed Herculaneum scroll.

But why? Doesn't that seem like a minimal requirement to prove the technique worked? Did you find any text or not?

It is a minimal requirement, but the paper explains why it hasn't yet been done. In addition to the logistical issues of getting access to the scrolls, technological issues also exist. To simplify to the point of being wildly inaccurate, "it don't scan gud and we need more resolution". As someone with no experience in this area, I'd imagine it will upend a small portion of the research community and spawn some fundamental research into improved imaging sensors.

I'd encourage you to read to the end of the paper. It is quite accessible and captivating.

This is super exciting research! Has there been any progress on creating new micro-ct scans of existing opened and closed Herculaneum scrolls?

Yes, definitely. Our research group and some others have been actively working with and scanning the materials from this collection to advance our understanding and methods. This is focusing on both open fragments and intact, sealed scrolls. Both are helping us work towards ultimately being able to read the sealed scrolls through CT.

I recently visited Herculaneum and found it fascinating, although lacking in educational facilities - there is just so much history there the guide book had so little. I hope if there is any content extracted that it gets noted in their materials.

How much written content in Herculaneum do you expect this technique will reveal?

Do you expect your technique will apply to other ancient texts beyond just Herculaneum?

Ultimately, the sky is the limit with the Herculaneum collection. It will probably be a slow and steady build though. We are working to prove the methods on the real Herculaneum material, at which point we can start extending the method to more of the intact scrolls. The segmentation and some other steps of the process still involve some manual work, so even once the concept is proven we will want to further automate those steps. If this all goes well, it would be an incentive for those in charge of the archaeological site to further explore parts of the still-buried Villa and look for more scrolls from the library. But even of those already excavated, we are looking at on the order of hundreds of intact scrolls that contain many columns of text each and are currently entirely unseen.

The technique definitely applies to other artifacts! The core pipeline we call Virtual Unwrapping and has been used to successfully reveal some ancient texts[1]. The primary challenge in this post is addressing the "carbon ink problem" specifically, where the ink looks identical in density to the uninked papyrus. But some artifacts make it easier, for example they are written with iron gall ink which shows up quite clearly in X-ray CT.

[1] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/9/e1601247.full

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