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Comment by sekai | Hacker News Reader

> We estimate that the scrolls we have in Naples contain more than 16 megabytes of text. Some members of our papyrology team say that revealing this text will be the greatest revolution in the classics since the Renaissance

Amazing achievement, let's hope the Italian government allows for additional excavation of the villa.

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they likely would, Pompeii and Herculaneum are _still_ being excavated after two centuries, it's not like things are still.

But we have only read 5% of this scroll and there are a ton more already excavated, it will probably take years before we manage to process what we already have.

> it will probably take years

In the direction things are going ... maybe a few months :)

There’s more to processing than scanning, it has has to be reviewed, transcribed and translated by linguistics experts, and then analyzed and studied by academics and researchers who can put in context and integrate it with what we currently know about history, cultural, philosophy, etc of the time.

The biggest bottleneck is getting the experts to read it. You need a decade or so of graduate level education and interpreting things takes apparently quite a long time.

Maybe that's another AI application.

I doubt it. Most universities have some professor in this area and a few graduate students. There is very little else for them to read (the entire of all classic books we have fits on a shelf), and most of them can read the original language. They will read this as soon as it is available just because it they don't have much else to read that is a primary source material. Thus everything new is of great interest because there is so little to work with.

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri was discovered in the 1800s, has been fully digitized and experts expect it to take I think 150 additional years before they can all be read to the level of scholarship that's required

I found some conversation on the difficulty here https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/16dj68i/h...

Thanks for the link. However the problems there do not seem to apply here. There the problem seems to be lots of little fragments that need to be fit together to figure out the scroll. Here the scrolls are complete in one piece, so we have a much better idea of how the parts fit together (not perfect since this is layers that have to be combined, but close). There just getting the text is hard, here we mostly have the text (though we will need to error correct, they are at least readable)

As much as I'd like to endorse study of the classics, I'm almost certain that AI will be better at interpreting the texts than humans very soon.

GPT 4.0 isn’t even remotely close to being useful at all in this case so I have some doubts about ‘very soon’

If you can automate the input, you can probably automate much of the basic analysis (things that would be "revolutionary" to undergrads).

"ChatGPT, give me the highlights of these ancient Greek scrolls ..."

The big problem is that the Villa of the Papyri is underneath modern buildings. That doesn't mean that excavation without demolition is impossible (see the Scavi underneath the Basilica of Saint Peter), but it makes things far more difficult.

If the prospect is very high to multiply by several times the total remaining classical works, I doubt that the money will be particularly hard to find ?

David W. Packard (HP heir) has been trying to throw money at doing this for years, so the money isn't as much of an issue as you'd think. The larger issue is that the locals don't want digging underneath their buildings, no matter how careful the excavators are. Also, all the money that would be necessary to excavate has made the project a target for the mafia who wants to get their share.

> the money isn't as much of an issue as you'd think. The larger issue is that the locals don't want digging underneath their buildings, no matter how careful the excavators are

This sounds like the money IS a huge issue. How expensive can it be to buy out the locals? We're talking about priceless cultural artifacts

> Also, all the money that would be necessary to excavate has made the project a target for the mafia who wants to get their share.

I wonder how far Italy will go once - if - they get rid of the mafia, it is like trying to drive a car with the handbrake on.

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