Title of work deciphered in sealed Herculaneum scroll via digital unwrapping | Hacker News Reader

Title of work deciphered in sealed Herculaneum scroll via digital unwrapping

finebooksmagazine.com

237 pointsnamanyayg118 comments

This is really exciting. If you're not aware, the scrolls at Herculaneum are an entire pagan library from the first century. They're burned, hard to recover, mostly still buried. Being able to decode them without physically digging them up and damaging them is awesome.

Who knows what we could find. So many books have been lost.

Seems a bit confusing to call it a "pagan library" when it's just the personal library of a very rich ancient Roman.

The ancient Roman elite often had extensive personal libraries which they shared with their friends, almost like a very primitive book publishing industry.

From the Christian, anyone who wasn't part of the Christian or Jewish faiths was considered pagan. In the first century CE, Epicureans were part of the broader category of Hellenistic pagan philosophers—which included Stoics, Platonists, and others—who were polytheistic or at least non-Christian. So since Philodemus makes up most of the library here, it's pretty safe to call it a "pagan" library.

But there is no reason to situate it in a Christian context. We are in a global multi religious community here. I could call your comment bad, supported by it being a trite semantic argument without relevancy for the subject. But that would do nothing to further the discussion here. Calling the library non-confucianist would be even more correct as Platonists are an important foundation for Christian thought. Though a completely useless labeling just as the pegan label.

> Calling the library non-confucianist would be even more correct as Platonists are an important foundation for Christian thought.

Epicureans aren't Platonists. We know that the library went heavy on Epicurean texts.

The word "pagan" is still used by Classicists today.

There is a reason to situate it in a roman context. Rome eventually becomes christianized and it makes sense to talk about before and after that. Obviously the old still influences the new, its not a hard line, but it is a major change in roman society.

The relevant context is the context in which it existed--that of a Roman library in pre-Christian Rome, making it a Roman library with no context of paganism. If it were a collection specifically of pagan writings assembled and maintained after Rome's widespread conversion to Christianity, then the pagan aspect would be meaningful, as it describes the relevance of that library to the society in which it existed.

To call it a "pagan" library now fails to describe it in the context of what it was at the time as well as what it is today, and instead is needlessly and aimlessly anchoring the perspective to the Christian world. It would be as if I described the library as being a Goy library--sure, I can, and wouldn't be technically wrong, but it's a meaningless distinction, and one that's more concerned about expressing the speaker's context than the subject's context, and the speaker is not relevant.

It’s not a meaningless distinction, as it cements it rather firmly in a broad era within a specific context of thought, unlike referring to it as a Goy library. If you refer to it as a Goy library, that both brings it within a Judeo-Christian context and completely loses all meaning. However referring to it as Pagan you now are more informed of the era and schools of thought employed at the time.

Wrong. This is essentially the context in which we still live today though we’ve secularized substantially over the past centuries. But Rome was on the path to Christianity at this time and later converted, so this is a very common way to understand things. Generally a work is one of a few things: Christian, Jewish, maybe Muslim depending on whom you ask, as it’s also an Abrahamic faith, or Pagan.

To be honest this feels more like you have an axe to grind with Christianity or its dominance, similar to the people pushing for “BCE/CE” over BC/AD. I don’t know why, but don’t expect the rest of the world to carry that cross for you.

When a scientist in India publishes a study, we don't call it a "pagan" study.

The word "pagan" adds nothing to the original post. "An entire library from the first century" conveys just as much information.

Indian studies were not part of the world of classical antiquity and you know it. Nobody is calling them pagan. And no, stripping that descriptor removes information from the statement.

Is there evidence of a single significant Christian library from the first century?

Pagan in this case would also exclude Judaism in its many different forms, which certainly had a long written tradition by that point.

Greece had multiple colonies in India and there was significant cultural diffusion in BCE times.

This isn't especially relevant. It barely covered a few scraps of northwest India. Most "Indo-Greek" civilization and culture was concentrated in Bactria and Sogdiana, not those few scraps of modern-day India, and BC Indo-Greek culture was not what we'd understand to be "Vedic Indian" so much as Persian-esque.

It also wasn't exactly part of the classical hellenistic civilization we talk about as the root of the western tradition, something of which I'm sure you're fully aware, making this a moot point.

To be honest, adding the word "pagan" just seem needlessly divisive. When I read about the past, nobody is going out of their way to point out that it's Pagan.

Do you believe that Goy/Goyim is similarly divisive? Or Kafir? And I’m not sure what books you’re reading, Pagan vs Christian Rome is a common distinction if the context hasn’t already made it obvious (such as here).

> Do you believe that Goy/Goyim is similarly divisive? Or Kafir?

Yes, which is why I don't use those words unless they are immediately relevant to the subject.

> This is essentially the context in which we still live today

Who's "we"? - It doesn't apply to everyone in the world, so you're assuming some limitations in who you're referring to.

GP makes a fair point. If you mean by "pagan" simply non-Christian and non-Jewish, then to make it relevant to call it a pagan library you would need to establish that it was curated specifically to exclude Christain or Jewish themes. You might as well call it a "non-Mithraic library", if it happens to exclude mention of Mithras, which was also an up-and-coming cult among the Romans in the first century. Then it would be incorrect or presumptious to call it "non-Mithraic", unless you'd first established that it contained no mention of Mithras. And the only reason you'd do that is if Mithras held a particular parochial relevance to you. You understand that not everyone holds up an image of Mithras as a prism through which to view everything else.

OTOH, if you mean by "pagan" just that it's Roman, but from before Rome converted to Christianity, then just say it's a first century Roman library.

America, which is the center of world power and culture. You may not like that but that doesn't make it untrue. It's also where most users of this site live.

GP does not make a fair point. We're specifically talking about classical antiquity which was a fairly bounded world. Warrior god cults, like that of Mithras, didn't have a strong role in the overall state and direction of the empire. They weren't major players and it is actually perfectly fine for terminology and understanding to focus on those.

Christianity is the prism through which the Romans later viewed things and through which the heirs of classical antiquity did. This isn't parochial, this reflects your general dislike of Christianity's dominance. But I don't actually have to make a normative argument that it should be, just the positive point that it is.

"Pagan" is a widely-accepted way to refer to Rome's old polytheistic religious traditions, which existed, but not unchallenged, around the first century.

> America, which is the center of world power and culture.

Yeah, ok. So an explicitly parochial prespective. This isn't compelling from a disinterested, objective perspective.

> Warrior god cults, like that of Mithras, didn't have a strong role in the overall state and direction of the empire. They weren't major players and it is actually perfectly fine for terminology and understanding to focus on those.

just like Christianity in 79AD Herculaneum

That's not parochial, that's realistic. If you have an axe to grind with American dominance that's your own bias; it's a fact, not something you can argue with on objective grounds. Keep your personal anti-Americanism out of this; it's keeping you from thinking clearly.

Christianity didn't have as strong an influence there and then, but it obviously did in the course of the Roman Empire, and this was around the time it started to grow. It's obviously relevant in a way cults of Mithras or Serapis or whomever else weren't.

Thank you, that's illuminating. So it's a first century scroll, discovered in Italy, and you insist it's only true categorization is from the perspective of a present-day American Christian, while also claiming that everyone else is ideologically blinkered...

I am saying the perspective of classical antiquity and its heir in western civilization, of which America is the current exemplar, is the correct one.

You know what else isn’t a compelling argument? This arduous attempt to argue that Christianity, the largest religion in the world and the very one that was adopted by Rome, is somehow inconsequential to the framing of what came before it. There is no logical argument that can be made to separate the two, for experts in the field will continue to use the term Pagan to refer to Pagan Rome no matter how much it hurts your feelings. It is simply the most objective and efficient method of separating it from the other. Unless of course you know of a better method that the historians do not? I’m sure they’d love to hear it.

> "Pagan" is a widely-accepted way to refer to Rome's old polytheistic religious traditions, which existed, but not unchallenged, around the first century.

Do you know for a fact that the library contained no mention of Jesus nor Judaism? If you don't know this, then why do you refer to it as pagan?

The point is: we have a Roman library from the first century AD. We don't know what it contains. To call it "pagan" tacitly assumes that (a) Christianity was not relevant to the collectors of the library, and (b) whether something is Christian or not is of primary interest whenever we discuss an artefact from the past.

We don't know whether (a) is true, and (b) is only true from a particularly dogmatic and insular perspective

Tbh, I'm struggling to understand what your point is apart from you're asserting that you view the world as centered on your own particular dogmatic tradition and you find it hard to understand why other's don't share that perspective

No, of course not. The accuracy of the original statement isn't the point. The point is to invalidate the ideologically-motivated conniption fit some people are pitching about a framing that is meet for the topic to have.

I don't live in USA lol

Before Christian Era and Christian Era.

My main gripe with it is the low entropy. In BC/AD each letter is unique. Even if you only heared 1 letter you still know what was said.

Seems like we could be using BCE/AV (for Anno Vulgi). This would be cromulent with how the BC/AD pair is half English and half Latin. And then for convenience and compatibility, shorten BCE to BC.

You are right.

it's just that the romans themselves had an identity crisis of "pagan" vs. "monothestic". So yes, you are right to call out the fact that situating it in the christian context would be follie.

But the original point still stands. Calling it pagan is still a correct classification of the works in the library.

Christianity didn't even really exist at that point, if would have been a minor cult.

So it doubly makes no sense.

It is definitely not correct, it's the equivalent of calling the ruins Italian instead of Roman.

I mean, part of what makes this library interesting is that nearly all of the classical Greek and Latin texts we have access to have been passed through the filter of generations of Christian monks copying those texts. Being able to see what these texts looked like without that filter is inherently interesting.

These people were non-Christian the same way they were non-Scientologists. They were unaware of Christianity and it had little to no impact on elite Romans by 79 AD.

"So since Philodemus makes up most of the library here, it's pretty safe to call it a "pagan" library."

You're confusing the tiny number of scrolls which have been preserved with what was likely in the complete library.

The complete library was much larger and likely contained the typical mix of philosophy, drama, poetry, and speeches copied over centuries from all over the Roman and Greek world.

So is the “pagan” moniker a way of dating the work to before the rise of Christianity with the Roman Empire?

To put it simply, "pagan" was a Christian insult towards non-Christians. It is not a reasonable description for anything unless you're in a very Christian context, and even then viewing it from a modern context "pagan" is a bit of a slur.

Just because a slur happens to be the same word as a technical term doesn't mean it can't be used as a technical term anymore. Anyone working in the field or had awareness of it knows the appropriate connotation.

It causes me physical pain when scientists change their practice to appease pearl clutching amateurs

It's not a technical term, calling things that aren't Christian "pagan" especially from before Christianity was prominent is silly and inaccurate.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C44&q=%22...

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%5Bpre+-+Chris...

Clearly modern scholars disagree with you, and it's not a matter of pearl clutching.

It just doesn't make sense to, for example, define an ancient Roman library as "pagan" (or even "pre-Christian") as if that is its defining characteristic. Unless you happen to be a medieval Christian monk of course, and then it makes complete sense.

Pre-Christian would make a lot of sense for me, precisely because in the Christian era, many of the pagan (!) authors and their works would be considered "problematic", if not outright purge-able.

The content of Roman libraries is likely to depend on their pre-Christian vs. Christian characters.

It shouldn't.

Christianity wasnt the official state religion of Rome until 380 CE at which point it only had legal status for 67 years. Christianity wasn't done covering europe until iceland in 1000 CE.

What might count as prechristian wasn't at all clear and depended on where you were and how official you want things to be, it also was absolutely not like flipping a switch or even gradual, it was rocky and complicated.

Uh. The first page of that seems to consist entirely of articles about Christians and their views of the ancient Greeks except for one article on neo-Paganism.

If anything, that seems to prove people's point that the term is of questionable value, except perhaps when discussing early Christians or I suppose if one is writing about Christianity.

I wouldn't say it's an insult so much as a catch all. Romans could worship any and many gods. Rome being a hub also included foreign religions.

Romans were polytheistic and didn't really have a name for their religion, nor did they think of it collectively as one thing separate from other religions, though very occasionally a set of practices might be referred to as what translates to "the Roman religion". Separate religions is really more of a monotheism thing. "Pagan" wasn't ever a self-identifying thing until well after the Christians took over and called them that for a long time.

"Foreign religions" weren't really much of a thing either, there were lots of gods and each village and city (and family really) would have their own versions of gods. Sometimes when you'd conquer a city you'd go to the most prominent temple and steal the statue or alter or whatever and bring it back to Rome with the vibe that you were stealing the god of the place you conquered.

it was not an insult. They called themselves pagans. There was a civil war or two in rome with Pagans on one side, and monotheism on the other. They used the term pagan, as in the "old ways". Many people died to decide the fact of whether "Rome" was going to continue as pagan, or convert to monotheism under the Kai Row.

>They used the term pagan, as in the "old ways"

That's not what the latin origin of pagan ever meant, it meant peasant or rural usually in the negative connotation common for city folks referring to people who lived outside of cities\. Were there ever any recorded instances of Romans referring to themselves as "pagan" as a group? Maybe one.

>"Rome"

Weird usage of scare quotes, especially in the time frame you are referring to, the name of the empire or the city was never ambiguous.

Very commonly yes.

Christianity had a really transformative impact on the Roman world so it makes sense to classify texts as pre and post Christianity. The date - literally BC and AD - don’t work so scholars have for a very long time clarified by calling the pre-Christian “pagan”.

Would monotheistic be a more appropriate description of non-pagers?

I don’t know anything about paganism but it seems like if the grouping excludes Jews and Christians non-Christian describes Jews and pagans.

Abrahamic (= worshipping the God of Abraham) is the word I've most often seen used.

That works for me but I'm still curious what a pagan is.

Anyone who disobeys Abrahamic "ten" commandments 0, 1 and/or 2 (depending how you count them) – that is, anyone who does not worship the Abrahamic God as the first and foremost deity.

I'm not sure whether atheists count as pagans. (Buddhists probably are…? But really, the term was designed for the religious practices of southern and (north-)western Europe that the early-ish Christian church wanted to wipe out.)

Thank you. This is a nice concise answer. The best part is geo-location of the term.

yes, it would. Monotheistic would be a much better term as that's how the people at the time viewed the divide.

In the first century CE, Christianity was barely on anyone’s radar. It’s indeed very odd to frame it this way?

it isn't. besides this library and a few a few texts that survived via the East, almost every Roman text that has survived to today has survived through being copied by Christians, and stored in a Christian library. the word pagan perhaps has negative connotations, but it's a very relevant distinction

Also, Christians were accused and publicly executed for being atheists, since they didn’t believe in the various polytheistic Gods.

In context its clear what is meant and that terminology has a long history.

Sure you could argue the terminology is very christian-centric, perhaps even offensive to pre-christian romans, but quite frankly that's a very uninteresting debate compared to the topic at hand.

I actually find this strange tendency of online commenters to link something to their own obscure interest very amusing. It's been a classic for as long as I recall but I encountered another today which I thought was very entertaining where a commenter remarked that he only just realized that "Suno" is the Hindi word for what we'd say in Latin as "Audi". In Latin! Hahaha!

I have decided that I, too, shall use obscure things as benchmarks and references. It's pretty good fun. In this post-Ragnarok-Online world one can imagine we need more such milestones to judge other things by.

In the sense that the later Christian Romans were very very eager to lean on the good ol' book burning.

One of the reasons only a fraction of a percent of the classical texts reached our days is the fact that Christians suppressed those texts, directly (by destroying them) and indirectly (by closing the libraries and temples and institutions of learning which preserved those texts).

I genuinely don't at all understand what the issue is with calling it a pagan library. It's a clear and substantive descriptor.

The history of the Roman Empire can be divided into two overarching periods - the pagan era and the Christian era. A pagan library is significantly more valuable than a Christian library, as we have far fewer pagan texts than Christian ones, and the few we do have were often corrupted by later Christian copyists. The word pagan is doing meaningful work in the sentence.

The word pagan has changed meaning, it would be more clear to call it an early Roman library. Pagan brings to mind a practice of worship in modern parlance.

It hasn't changed meaning, that's the only thing that it ever meant.* Religious practices are a hugely relevant distinction for the history of the Roman Empire, the same way it is relevant to distinguish pre-Islamic and Islamic Arabia. Early Christianity and Islam radically transformed the lives of the people subjected to them.

Just because the technical use of a term is not familiar to lay people doesn't mean it is unclear or unhelpful. Here on HN, we all know what C-style strings are, even if an ordinary person might hear that and picture some kind of nautical rope.

* In English, at least. The Latin word paganus did change meaning (the original sense was 'rural'), but this occurred centuries before the emergence of English.

> Being able to decode them without physically digging them up and damaging them is awesome.

Can you provide some citations on the technology being used in situ without digging up? As far as I understood this is the application of technology widely popularized by the Herculaneum Challenge, where scrolls are still physically dug up, and x-rayed (which will slowly still damage the scrolls) but without physically breaking them open as was repeatedly attempted in the past.

I don't care much about the slow damage from x-rays: as long as the content is succesfully extracted, one can imagine little other use for the scrolls as is.

I mostly hope some lost works on mathematics will be recovered..

They have been dug up already. IIRC they have undergone extensive scanning over the years - X-Ray, CT etc - while not being unrolled.

So they have the scans of the rolled up scrolls, this is "just" (ha!) using the scan data with lots of algorithms and compute (AI? I presume so) to virtually unroll the scrolls and read the ink off the page.

And still plenty more to be dug up, allegedly.

Actually, they are CT scanning them as the project continues. IIRC they reported about scanning a new (big) batch of them about a month ago.

You are right about not unrolling them though. Many scrolls were destroyed in previous attempts to unroll them physically, so it is fascinating to see how the technology has progressed to allow reading without unrolling.

There is a PBS documentary about this very thing and how it got started. Very cool and worth the watch. Needless to say, the researcher had quite a few hurdles to overcome.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw44V49Fz9U

"Video unavailable The uploader has not made this video available in your country"

So much for the global internet.

VPN

probably similar video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_L1oN8y7Bs

At the start of the article it links to a previous article on the scroll from February 2025 which has some more background details:

https://www.finebooksmagazine.com/fine-books-news/inside-her...

In particular this part:

Researchers are further refining the image using a new segmentation approach in the hopes that it will improve the coherence and clarity of the lines of text currently visible, and perhaps reach the end of the papyrus, the innermost part of the carbonised scroll, where the colophon with the title of the work may be preserved.

So the new article is indicating they were able now to decipher the title, and also indicates maybe why the title was not the first thing deciphered (presumably it is hardest to read the innermost parts.)

I'm curious why the title is in the inside of the scroll. That implies you have to completely open it to read the title - is that the way scrolls are usually written?

If you're rolling the scroll up as you read (or, I guess, write) it, you'll leave it rolled up like that. I presume you're expected to rewind the tape before you return it, if you borrowed it from somebody else.

Maybe the title was on both ends. That way, you'd still be able to tell what it was quickly even if not rewound. And the one on the outside just burned away.

This is awesome but I get so worried that we're just hallucinating meaning in those little splotches.

> Both images were independently reviewed by the Vesuvius Challenge papyrological team, led by Federica Nicolardi. The simultaneous reproduction of the title image from multiple sources, along with independent scholarly review, provides a high degree of confidence in the reading.

You have 2 teams using the same data, getting to the same conclusion. You also have an author that's known from other sources, with writings that we already "have". Then you have a team of experts reviewing this. Chances are these are real findings and not "hallucinations". Not everything in ML is gen-ai...

>You also have an author that's known from other sources, with writings that we already "have".

Well, that's exactly what you'd expect from a hallucination no? If the model is overfit enough on the relevant corpus, a title that already exists should be much more likely.

The ML models are looking at tiny patches for areas of ink vs. no-ink, trained on the boundaries of more visible letters found by humans. They don't know what proper Greek letters look like, and they definitely don't know what correct Greek words would be (in particular, they have no "corpus" of words). Any possible overfitting is ordinary human overfitting.

If they have learned on ink areas shaped as letters, what prevents them from having a bias towards such shapes?

Because they don't get to see the entire letter shapes. The page at [0] shows the basic idea: they're forced to make decisions based on each part of each stroke of the letter. If they were heavily overfitting on the strokes of the letters in the training sample, then they'd be so inaccurate outside the sample that the assembled outputs would hardly resemble letters at all, much less words.

(Also, this is heavily-damaged handwriting, not clear print, so each letter isn't even uniform in shape. A model trying to cheat at ink detection would have an uphill battle trying to guess what all the variant letter shapes might be.)

[0] https://scrollprize.org/grandprize#how-accurate-are-these-pi...

To add to this, the main ML parts, as I understand it, are for the initial unrolling of layers, and for the detection of ink vs. no-ink (the position of the 'splotches'). Both of these are trained and calibrated from human observations.

All interpretation of ink as Greek letters is done purely by human inference. This may lead to errors, especially in parts where the ink is preserved especially poorly or where the text is totally different from expectations, but it would be classic human error instead of AI hallucination.

> You have 2 teams using the same data, getting to the same conclusion.

> You also have an author that's known from other sources, with writings that we already "have".

> Then you have a team of experts reviewing this.

Only the first of those points is evidence against the result being hallucinated.

We are not. This is more forensics (using ML to learn what the clues are) than "AI".

It is not very common to find pre-Kanishka works. I hope that we get some insight into human lives around this time. One of the things I find fascinating about ancient times is how similar humans of then were to us. Akrotiri (similarly preserved by volcanic eruption) was millennia before even the works in this discovery and yet seemed strangely familiar and normal when visiting.

Brent Seales was my second CS professor and taught me how to do OOP in C++. It’s always cool to randomly see the work he’s done every few months. He was working on this project nearly twenty years ago.

Mine too. He started as a teacher at UK my sophomore year. To not be considered one of the top CS colleges, UK has/had some awesome professors.

Indeed :)

> Using ‘virtual unwrapping’, the scroll PHerc. 172 which is housed at the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford has been identified as On Vices by the Greek philosopher Philodemus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philodemus

Neat

This is so cool

As a history nerd and jaded software developer, I've been wondering a lot lately how I can use my tech skills for archeological research. Is there any way for someone with most of a bachelors to get into this kind of thing?

My experience with academia is that most of this hard work is done by undergrads, and conception and management by professors; developers aren't hired to do this. So besides "going back to school", there's no way in for an outsider.

Well, they are hiring [0]. Sounds like a great way to start. Or you can join the Vesuvius Challenge if you prefer competing.

[0] https://scrollprize.org/jobs

They say they're hiring but I didn't even get an email back about my application and I've been awarded $20k through the vesuvius challenge and have 10 years experience in the exact job they're hiring for so I really don't know what they're looking for or if they're looking that hard.

Sorry to hear this happened as this shouldn't have been lost. I'll make sure we get in touch with you.

This really is a herculean act. bravo. my condolences to all those archeology students who will never brush ash away with the same carelessness as before today. Is it really worth digging destructively ?

>This really is a herculean act

One might even say it's Herculanean ;)

> Philodemus was an Epicurean philosopher and poet from Gadara whose ethical teachings emphasise the pursuit of pleasure as central to a good life. He argued against rigid logic and formal rhetoric, believing that philosophy should serve practical human happiness rather than abstract intellectual debate.

As a layman admirer of Epicurean thought, I’m so glad that even after so many wars, destruction and tragedy over the centuries, such wonderful works have survived.

It's more like "they recognized the title of a known work" rather than deciphering it, otherwise it would be very hard to fully read it. This is truly a herculesn task ahead. I wonder if there are other scanning methods that can help

they say they deciphered it - ok, so what does it say!? the most important information is omitted... so annoying.

They identified it by title as a copy of a known work. This information appears very early in the article.

The Greek writing visible in the image reads: ΦΙΛΟΔΗΜΟΥ ΠΕΡΙ ΦΥΣΕΩΣ This translates into English as: Of Philodemus, On Nature

ΠΕΡΙ ΚΑΚΙΩΝ Ά

About vices - part A

Interestingly, as written, it is ΚΑΚΙωΝ not ΚΑΚΙΩΝ.

Originally there was no minuscule/majuscule (uppercase/lowercase) distinction in Greek writing (or Latin for that matter). They did have handwritten forms designed to be written faster, which is what the ω is in this case. Of course, those handwritten forms evolved often evolved into the forms we think of as lowercase forms today.

Instead of an interesting discussion about the technologies used to unravel these documents, it quickly degraded into the usual politicized issues that plague the United States, and sadly it seems, now this forum.

I tried emailing Dang, to remove my account with no response. HN administrators, if you read this can please remove my account?

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