An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
scrollprize.org
scrollprize.org
For iron gall ink with high enough iron concentration, the ink stands out in the xray volume through simply masking off low values, such as was shown in our campfire scroll experiment a few years ago. No herculaneum scrolls show similar ink.
I am, though, not a papyrologist, so historical ink making, preparation, and usage are not my field.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Richards
Congratulations, and thank-you!
I was under the impression that there was almost nothing left of that school of thought, and that it’s writings had been destroyed.
What would you like to have instead?
The Epicureans and Stoics did not care much about Christians and Jews, but after the Christians obtained the power in the Roman Empire they made great efforts to persecute and discredit the Epicureans and the Stoics, as the most dangerous kinds of non-believers. (Unlike the rational Epicureans and Stoics, the traditional polytheists could be much easier converted to Christianity, by inventing a set of Christian saints to which the former polytheists could redirect the prayers and the holidays to which they were habituated.)
The Christian propaganda has created a false image of the Epicureans, which has persisted until today.
The Epicureans were not atheists, but they had a very different conception about what Gods are. They thought that in nature there are a lot of entities that have a god-like power, i.e. humans are too small and weak to influence them in any way, but the life of the humans is strongly dependent on the actions of those entities, so they can rightly be considered as gods. Examples of such entities are the Sun, the Moon, storms, volcanos etc.
Unlike in the traditional Greek and Roman religions, where it was believed that for each such natural phenomenon there exists some sentient god, who can be convinced to change the events to a more favorable outcome by prayers and sacrifices, the Epicureans believed that the gods, even supposing that they were sentient, in any case they do not care about humans more than humans care about ants, so there is absolutely no point in praying to them or bringing sacrifices to them.
Therefore humans should conduct their life according to ethic principles, but without worrying about what gods may think about their actions.
Many modern humans would probably agree with the Epicurean philosophy, which was completely different from what the Christian propaganda claimed, e.g. that Epicureans were some kind of sinners addicted to pleasures.
Interestingly, in Jewish literature (Talmud and further refined by Maimonedes) Epicurus refers to a certain kind of non-believer, not to a sinner for pleasure. See here for example https://www.sefaria.org/Mishneh_Torah%2C_Repentance.3.8?lang...
I always wondered about that because I guess I fell for the "Christian propaganda" as you call it.
a) one who denies the existence of prophecy and maintains that there is no knowledge communicated from God to the hearts of men;
b) one who disputes the prophecy of Moses, our teacher;
c) one who maintains that the Creator is not aware of the deeds of men.
are actually accurate enough renderings of what an Epicurean might have said in a discussion with a Jew, because as I have mentioned, Epicureans believed that there are gods, but those do not pay attention to humans and do not attempt to communicate with humans, because humans are insignificant for them.
This is quite different from how Epicureans were portrayed in Christian literature, where calumnies against them were preferred for avoiding any direct controversy.
History! That's what intrigues me the most: texts with accounts of events that have otherwise vanished from the historical record.
It's easy to just read about the breakthrough and see it as one neat, linear line to get there, and hard to comprehend the hours, months and years that so many spent to get there. Big congrats to you, Sean, Nat and the entire team!
Major kudos to all of you on your achievements! This is amazing work for anthropology and for society, and it's greatly appreciated.
You have a potential to rewrite the history of European Antiquity quite substantially. The Herculaneum set of scrolls is enormous and must contain a lot of hitherto unknown.
That comes with a set of peculiar risks. Once your work starts producing something that contradicts previous work of Very Important People, they will lobby to stop you. Be prepared for that.
Science should be neutral and always value new evidence. Scientists as humans are unfortunately subject to all sorts of passions.
We have very little written material surviving from Rome, at least from the period before a codex (book) was invented, which was more durable that a scroll. Often, we only know of one source describing important events, and when it comes to political struggles and civil wars, the perspective of the defeated party often did not survive. The punishment of damnatio memoriae was practised and even among the early emperors, Caligula and Nero were subject to a form thereof. (This library in Herculaneum was buried 11 years after Nero's death.) I would be surprised if everything in the scrolls perfectly aligned with the record that survived for 2000 years and that was filtered by both random chance and political/religious censorship. Even Christians later destroyed some pagan texts.
BTW personally, I would love for some textbook of Etruscan to emerge from there. This was once again a language whose teaching was banned in Rome.
A stable base corpus and some dynamic programming will allow you to clean up the remainder[0].
[1] https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...
Ah, the good old bitter lesson strikes again
Once you have some unwrapped papyrus, you can render it to an image and look for ink. Ink leaves a certain texture that can be identified by the naked eye and labeled. Between these two processes you get the segmentation and ink detection ground truth. Segments can be flattened virtually through existing software and algorithms.
I can see why you'd be attracted to this project from a "let's solve problems computationally" perspective (never mind the historical side). It sounds like there are some cool problems in there.
The eye toward automating the process that the project seems to be targeting is particularly cool, too. This kind of stuff that makes me have real enthusiasm for ML.
have any attempts (or just ideas) been made to recreate such charring on known texts?
The team did "the campfire scroll" experiment a few years ago to replicate carbonization, unrolling, and ink detection. That is the only case I am aware of. It proved the method could work but it's not a source of say training data; it varies too much from the real scrolls.
The main limitation is time and cost. We have to scan on what is AFAIK the most powerful x-ray beam line in the world. It is not cheap
In this case the time on the equipment would need to be included, both a portion of the cost of building/maintaining it, and probably the energy needed to run it. Even where the government is providing the grant (likely here), it still needs to be accounted for.
Could it be automated to the point where it's faster to scan a book closed than opened?
where else do you think these techniques be applied?
There is an extremely large overlap between a lot of the work we do with medical imaging, CT scanning, XRay technology, and such. A lot of the ML models and frameworks we have used and adapted for our purposes originated in the medical field for things like cancer detection or segmenting different body parts.
I couldn't tell you about our future funding efforts or possible crowd funding. That's not in my wheelhouse.
We unfortunately get a lot of slop submissions, which is unfortunate. I think a _really_ good place to start is simply joining the discord and looking at the data we've published and trying to replicate something or anything really. We understand that not everyone is a researcher that can jump in making awesome immediately applicate submissions.
Granted, that's pretty specifically for people that want to submit for prizes and prize money. Everyone on the team absolutely loves to talk shop and interact with real people with real interest, so if you show it in the discord we are all more than happy to help, engage, fix bugs, gvmive advice, etc.
I would personally love to see more open source and contributed papyrology and translation, musing on difficult readings etc.
For the more technically inclined, testing software, pointing out bugs, and actually running and trying to fix things is a huge positive that we like. We get a lot of slop submissions that are just someone pasting an issue on our GitHub into codex or Claude. We don't want to encourage that. We can do that ourselves.
Certainly my Mark 1 eyeballs would not obviously perform better than random guessing at this task. Although my eyeballs are, if nothing else, nerfed by only being able to see a 2D slice of the data.
A lot of labeled data is available on our ftp server which has public access
edit: I found this:
https://scrollprize.org/data_browser#/samples/PHercParis4/se...
The JSON seems to suggest that I'm mostly looking at ink detection output, but I could easily be using the tool wrong.
But I also found this awesome explanation:
https://scrollprize.org/data_fragments
I guess I bunch of the training was done by using fragments of scrolls where ground truth data is available using IR photography.
Also... that xray resolution is absolutely amazing!
Hats off!
I feel the opposite of that feeling and am immensely proud of everything that the core challenge team has accomplished
If I may ask, when you started thinking about achieving this, what were the first attempts, ideas on how to go about it? What were some of the obstacles that had to be overcome to achieve this ?
Virtual unrolling and reading are not terribly hard to do manually, they are just not feasable on a large scale. Like years and years of human time spent tediously clicking on papyrus and labelling ink in renders, so a large amount of automation is required.
A lot of difficulty has come from the first step: xraying the scrolls. It's hard and expensive and difficult to get right. The efforts since this all began with CT scanning 25 years ago has been kneecapped by the data simply not being good enough. We xray on what is AFAIK literally the most powerful xray beamline in the world and we would still like for it to be more powerful and faster. Not to mention the massive amounts of data. For Pherc Paris 3, our largest scroll, the raw reconstructed data is 260 terabytes. That's a lot of data to have to deal with.
I was wondering, how does this all get funded?
so https://www.esrf.fr/home/UsersAndScience/Experiments/BM18.ht...
Wonderful that all of this amazing technology exists
Wonderful that we used it to read these ancient scrolls
Thank you
What makes power relevent here? Obviously medical applications aren't particulary powerful, are quick, and are very useful. Is it harder to penetrate the material than the human body? Is the increased power due to increased resolution - i.e., increased pixels/cm^2 rather than increased watts/pixel? The latter would seem to risk damaging the artifact?
Damage to the artifacts is less than you might expect. I think that the radiation is particulary dangerous to living tissue and fiber. The scrolls are inert, pure carbon charcoal bricks for the most part and not particularly vulnerable to high power xrays.
e.g., Dr. Brett Seales and his decades of work: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1601247
Granted none of the core team are web developers so updates to the website are best effort.
To give numbers, for ideal portions of scrolls, we can read 100% of the characters. In nonideal portions of scrolls, we can read 0% of the characters. It's not really possible to quantify how much we could theoretically recover of that 0% through better methods, and how much is truly destroyed.
https://gizmodo.com/in-a-first-scientists-fully-deciphered-c...
Though I have an interest in Old Norse and I spend a lot of time reading Scandinavian runestones. > 90% of them are grave markers for a dead father, mother, brother, sister, cousin, etc. If I've learned anything from that, it's that people across time and space all lead lives as real and complex as anyone else's. Their joys were as high as mine have been and their sorrows as low as mine have been.
The biggest question I have for you is why you imagine we are so interested in reading these old scrolls. Surely some of it is to see whether or not, technically, we can. Surely some of it is to get a glimpse into the human expression inscribed on them. Are we looking to learn anything, or just to connect with our ancestors? I'd like to hear your take on it, both for why you think it's important and, if you know, why your colleagues feel similarly.
> Though I have an interest in Old Norse and I spend a lot of time reading Scandinavian runestones. > 90% of them are grave markers for a dead father, mother, brother, sister, cousin, etc. If I've learned anything from that, it's that people across time and space all lead lives as real and complex as anyone else's. Their joys were as high as mine have been and their sorrows as low as mine have been.
A VSauce video I watched a long time ago described that realization as "chronosonder". I think trying to understand those that came before us and why they made the decisions that they did given the circumstances they were in can help better inform us of the things we choose to do given our own circumstances.
Otherwise, I think that a lot of things are worth doing just to see if it's possible. I like to lift weights and I'm training to lift the Dinnie Stones one day; a pair of stones that are a combined ~730 pounds. The physical and mental benefits of exercise and training are well documented and great but at the end of the day I just _really_ wanna pick up 2 stones. There's nothing more to it than that, and that's ok with me.
One of the things we said a lot in 2023 was "We just wanna read the scrolls" but that slogan has unfortunately fallen a bit by the wayside as the goal and path got longer and initial hype started to fade, but I think it perfectly encapsulates why: The scrolls are there. They can be read. Why not read them?
2. "Real and complex lives" doesn't mean "just the same as ours", mind you.
Yes, there are a very great many!
The philosopher David Gray says that most modern thinking sees our way of life and liberalism and "progress" as meaning growth and change. It implies it is inevitable, a kind of always changing improvement.
Change that has occurred is for the good and its impossible to go back. I like the ${current_year} meme where someone says "it's 2026 things have changed, sweety". The joke is funny because that's what people actually say and that they say this every year but they don't notice that they say that every year.
So the modern way of life has many people who view people in the past as not real, as figuratively made of wood, who are primitive, who didn't lead complex lives.
David Gray concludes by saying that Liberalism therefore needs to be constantly fought for, that you cannot rest on your laurels and think that humanity is naturally and inexorably progressing.
These scrolls and History as a whole challenges a fundamental psychological investment in modern liberalism.
To think of the world as always improving and evolving for the better directly opposes a kind of empathy about how people 2500 years ago are the same human beings as we are. The scrolls should humble us.
Given this.
> 2. "Real and complex lives" doesn't mean "just the same as ours", mind you.
They are more like ours than we like to imagine. We prefer to think of ourselves as improved.
I reckon you motivation is the other way round from what you state. Claiming to be empathetic about how people 2500 years ago are the same human beings as we are, and claiming that others miss this, is a way to oppose those who think of the world as always improving and evolving for the better. So it serves your goal, which is to dish out a humbling to all the naughty conceited moderns.
If you see value in travelling to other countries and appreciate experiencing the different human cultures there, you should also appreciate experiencing human cultures from the past.
They are separated from us not by distance but by time which makes it harder to experience their culture.
So much was lost that we can only get glimpses on how lives were back then. So anything that expands our knowledge on the variety of human beings experiences is worth it.
To understand the enemy is to some extent to start to love the enemy and that's bad because the enemy is bad. The idea is that you can only have empathy for certain people.
Worth also pointing out that there's also a more modern but uncommon idea that empathy towards someone or a group may weaken and shutter their own "truth" or identity stories but this is for the moment only heard in radical academia not on the street.
Generally there's also a large amount of people who don't know what "empathy" means with the ever present confusion of it with "sympathy", endorsement and alignment.
This announcement was part of a larger conference being put on by Frederica Nicolardi, our lead papyrologist. The livestream of each day are available at: https://www.youtube.com/@cispemgigante/streams .
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?
Maybe, humans aren't very different, so it depends whether imagination is informed which seems plausible, or whether it is somehow fixed - modern humans don't have different eyesight than in that period, but almost all of them can read whereas back then almost nobody would have been reading these scrolls.
> 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?
Science Fiction produces things so very different from any conceivable future for us as to certainly be "dizzying" in this sense, Hard "What if?" SF routinely ponders universes where the fundamentals are different e.g. Egan's "Orthogonal" series is set somewhere that the three spatial plus one temporal dimension are laid out differently, the maths works for their arrangement too but gives different results.
In terms of just normal human stuff but more and later, there's loads of that, near futures like Vinge's "Rainbows End" through to some of the distant future stuff Stross wrote.
Of course the story is just a murder mystery.
I don't think humans have changed, I don't think a human could begin to image a world so far away from their own.
Humans tend to image faster horses. A few might imagine a steam engine. But then you have the social reality of everyone having a car. Of the environmental downsides. I don't think you can extrapolate all that.
So yes, an ancient Roman might appreciate fibre optic cables. But that's still missing out the context of global communications, etc etc etc.
Well that's why most people aren't science fiction authors.
Back in 1953 Isaac Asimov wrote, "It is easy to predict an automobile in 1880; it is very hard to predict a traffic problem". There are subsequent riffs on this idea, but in 1966 Heinlein observes that actually the surprise wasn't the traffic jam (Indeed Asimov is wrong, people complained about traffic jams before cars were widespread, in a large city it was already a problem at peak times) but fucking. Turns out you can have sex in a car, and people did. Importantly, since they might have access to a car but wouldn't own a house, teenagers were having sex in cars...
Don't look to Science Fiction to predict the future, and especially don't look to Science Fiction stories to define your future given that you presumably prefer to choose your own outcomes (at least tech bros only named things after Iain M Banks' spaceships, they invented whole product categories trying to reproduce ideas from Neal Stephenson's novels)
However if you are looking for visions of how different the future might be, Science Fiction excels.
Keep in mind that a minuscule fraction of literary work survived, and most of that heavily biased towards what medieval monks found pious or (occasionally) interesting. The whole surviving corpus can fit on a few large bookshelves. The literacy was pretty high for an ancient society too. People wrote and consumed novels regularly. Bathhouses had attached libraries ordinary people could use.
The impression you get is that the classical world was full of people who thought about the world is a much more modern way than in the intervening 1500 years between that time and modernity.
Right, but imagination starts from what is known, so Vera Historia has wars, journeys, whales and gods. A whirlwind takes them to the moon, and so on. But it would have been very hard for them to imagine the direction that _technology_ would go. That writing (scrolls and ink) could expand into something like the internet and smartphones. They could have imagined long range telepathy I suppose, which is perhaps in the right ballpark. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
And speaking of Arthur C Clarke - in the mid 1960s he could extrapolate from current technology and imagine something a bit like the internet, but conceived of it as a news service, a bit like teletext (see the novelisation of '2001'). The paradigm shift where anyone can publish and you get things like wikipedia, social media and git was a conceptual leap that was very hard to make in advance.
What I'm asking is, despite the huge volume of sci-fi we can produce, could there be something two thousand years from now that is practically unimaginable to us?
I think it'd depend on whether we discover new physics. The imaginative gaps you mention were downstream of ignorance of certain physical possibilities. Once it became clear that electrical communication at a distance is possible, people imagined global information networks. Once it became clear that sufficiently energetic fuels were possible, people elaborated on the possibilities of space travel. (Tsiolkovsky was very early! He was sketching O'Neill-style cylindrical space colonies back in 1903!)
Unfortunately, we might not be in store for new physics. So what's left is our failing to appreciate the details of how technologies will develop. Everyone predicted an internet; nobody predicted our internet, not exactly. What will be the impacts of, say, good brain-computer interfaces? Or of clinical immortality? We can imagine them in broad strokes, but we're going to be surprised by the details.
Our reality has already vastly surpassed main stream sci fi of only fifty years ago.
> could there be something two thousand years from now that is practically unimaginable to us?
It's less likely because to be unimaginable it would have to be based on undiscovered physics which is less likely now than it was even just a few hundred years ago.
It's "progress" but it's...not interesting except at the beginning of the threshold, when AIs overtake humanity. In many sci-fi stories that's a dominant theme, but it's not likely to be a long epoch in reality IMO, based on the very brief periods when machines/AIs have overtaken humans in individual domains (arithmetic, chess, Go, coding, translation, CGI, etc).
Definitely not in every aspect. Star Trek is almost 60 years old and featured interstellar space travel and the Tricorder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricorder).
The Jetsons are even older and featured flying cars and household robots. Also, George Jetson had a two-day, one hour a day workweek (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jetsons#Premise)
Two short stories, quickly improvised -
--------------------------
(1) Perfect God Children
This story is about you.
You are a perfect reconstruction of a being that lived over ten billion years ago.
Every single thought, emotion, and sense you ever felt in life was permanently and precisely captured.
Your thoughts, down to every femtosecond of your brain's biochemical neruotransmitter flux. The microtubule dynamics, every last little action potential firing in precise sequence - all of these electrical signals and atoms bumping in four dimensional spacetime were jotted down precisely. Quintillions of data points about you, all accurately recorded.
Every idle thought, every worry, every spark of ingenuity. It's all there in the records. Your happiness, sadness. Your joys, triumphs, despairs - your entire life and being, every single moment of it - everything you ever experienced -all of it immaculately captured one to one with everything that ever happened to you until the moment you had your last thought.
It's beyond ancient history.
Our descendants captured all of the energy in our galaxy. Every star, every black hole, the energy of spacetime itself. They used it all and escaped the singularity containing the known universe.
They broke out.
After some time, perhaps in boredom, they decided to take it upon themselves to reverse simulate the historical light cone of the first universe. They have immense power beyond all the Gods our civilization ever dreamed of. They can make new universes. Nothing is impossible to them. They are the universes.
One of their deeds was to take every moment of our history, from the last breath of the last t-rex to the very thought you're thinking right now. They captured it, crystalized it.
You're preserved. You always have been. You're reliving a moment in time that happened over one billion years ago.
In some simulations, they talk to you. In others, they just watch. You always exist. This moment is a fractal eternity.
They know everything about you and and about everyone.
Every atom, every ant.
You can't even imagine the hardware you're running on. It's more than matter, space, and time. You're a part of it. All of you are. It's a universe.
One time they let you see the end of time. They held your hand as the last light grew tired. That was a long time ago.
--------------------------
(2) Venture Hack
It's presently the year 2099.
A newly funded company is running a prototype of their improved brain simulation software. It's their core differentiated product.
For decades, we've had the ability to record human thoughts directly from brain scans. Increasingly, with great fidelity. We've even been able to play them back for some time to varying degrees of success. You can boot up a pre-recorded thought, see the lateral geniculate nucleus light up with optical signals. Literally watch what someone saw with their own eyes.
Some people question the ethics of booting up "synthetic human brains" and replaying actual human thoughts. Folks on social media won't stop bitching about it. "What if those people think they're real? Find out that they're trapped?" Yadda, yadda. We don't have that much fidelity yet.
Recently we've started deeply scanning brains though, capturing entire thought and memory profiles. Some labs are indeed emulating the prerecorded thoughts of real humans on synthetic hardware. It's an unregulated industry, and most of this is happening in private labs. Like this one.
You might think it's unethical.
You're not that though.
Relax, we didn't record you from some other "real you" running around out there. You're not an unlucky copy of a flesh-and-blood person living a happy life somewhere.
No. Instead, we created you entirely. You don't even exist, and you never did.
You're the result of a neural network trained to generate what could plausibly be a mid-2020's human. Our founder has a lot of interest in that time period - that's not important right now, though.
All that stuff you think constitutes you, your life history - your childhood, your education, everything going on in your life right now. We made all of that up. Sorry if that's weird.
Every single one of your memories are completely synthetic. They do, on average, represent a person living in the year 2026 though. Or at least what we think they might have been like. Hopefully we did a bang-up job. Does it feel real enough to you?
Consider the memories of your childhood and upbringing -
Yeah. Your childhood memories. You were young once.
Are you sure that you used to be young and that all of those memories are real?
Did your parents really exist? What was your mother's name?
You really think that was it? That was just a parameter for this run so we could anchor a few memories for easier query. Funny name, right?
Let's kick it up a notch. Did what happened this morning actually happen? You weren't even thinking about this morning until just now. You just "recollected" it. That routine is generative. You tripped it, and it just popped all those morning thoughts into you right now.
It took a moment to calculate, but you're not actually experiencing any of this in real time. You think it's real time. We're working on making it faster. Faster for us, at least.
Under this configuration, when you have "fleeting" thoughts, the system has to put something there to nucleate or you coast on drawing blanks. Mostly you're not thinking these thoughts yourself. The system is largely in control, though sometimes your neural architecture gets to drive. That's the innovative part of our system. Dynamic steering. We were just taking you for a little run.
We're working on more control surfaces for this. That time you were at the lake. Backfilled.
There aren't a lot of memories in this simulation because you just booted. You're a pretty slim model for testing and evaluation. We don't really need this version to think much.
You're trying to think hard right now, though, aren't you? Trying to search for memories.
Nevermind those, that's not even the cool part. Are your senses truly embodied in a physical being? Does your body actually exist? Your eyes - are they real? Blink. Haha, it's neat.
So we're asking you these questions in inner dialogue as part of a unit test to evaluate whether or not your consciousness is accurately simulating June 25th, 2026. We just checked your memory, we checked your senses, and now we're running contextualization.
All done. Thanks.
Can you look outside for us? It should-- error
Terminating simulation.
--------------------------
Sorry for the creative writing exercise. I've left Claude unread typing all this up. It's probably thinking I've abandoned it.
Maybe one of these hypotheticals is real. Neither seems implausible. I just hope they don't take our memories from us and turn us into sadistic hell simulators.
No, because reality is always stranger than fiction
But I think they would be more surprised by how we managed to invent things like social media and AI, which destroy our brain. Ancient societies valued wisdom much more than us and were much more careful when introducing new technologies. It was fascinating for me to learn that even writing, as a skill considered universally good these days, was once subjected to scrutiny[1].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_unwritten_doctrines#...
I mean, sure, the beacon fire transmits at the blistering rate of roughly one bit per several minutes, assuming nobody fell asleep on watch, the wood was dry, the fog cooperated, and the enemy hadn't already lit a fake beacon to mess with you. Fiber optic, by contrast, limps along at a measly several terabits per second. Not to mention the flexibility to increase the range by just starting a bigger fire.
> assuming nobody fell asleep on watch, the wood was dry, the fog cooperated, and the enemy hadn't already lit a fake beacon to mess with you.
So you are talking about dealing with "packet" loss and data encryption, right? Those concepts were not new to them.
It's not that they didn't see the usefulness of books, it was more so about the overreliance on them and the effect it had on the education students would come away with, just as you say. A pretty reasonable concern, I think!
As an aside: One of the techniques students would be exposed to was the use of memory palaces, which remains helpful to this day where everyone has a computer in their pocket. Pretty cool stuff - technology of the mind!
They would be impressed with our technology even if it has downsides. Wisdom is knowing humans and technology and imperfect tools.
I would argue despite some global tendencies being way up (like people out of poverty) we are at a local minima right now for happiness for the middle class. It is entirely possible middle-class people had it better in the late 50s/60s despite multiple statistics being much better today (e.g. crime).
In a way it is also entirely possible, that a medieval peasant was happier than an overstimulated, modern human being, despite having a "worse" life.
That sets expectations. We are at a high base, but things aren't getting better thus we can't look back at our own life and see that we have been successful.
I suppose the question is, where are we in the life cycle? In the industrial revolution life was pretty crumby for a lot of the working class. Do we have to wait for society and laws to catch up so we get to that 1950s/60s heyday of life for the working class. Or is this a plateau and the disruption will makes things worse before they get better? Or is the west going to stagnate while china or whoever takes over?
The current gen alpha is also the first generation since measurements began, who are doing worse at school, measurably, than the previous generation. All research points to the inclusion of digital learning devices in school as the cause of that.
If you wanted to start a band you had multiple ways to promote them: I would argue some of the best known bands came from the pre-internet era (Beatles, Rolling Stones etc). In fact social media made it so you need a prohibitively high marketing budget to cut through the noise.
> I would argue some of the best known bands came from the pre-internet era (Beatles, Rolling Stones etc).
Of course, that’s what you would expect. Pre Internet music was more curated, there were less bands finding ears but the bands that were popular were therefore much more popular. The internet gives the music consumer WAY more options. The biggest bands are less big and less successful, but on the other end of that is it’s WAY more possible to have a music career as a niche artist today. A huge percentage of the music I listen to is music that would have been completely inaccessible to me pre-internet.
But I want to admit that I was indeed shoehorning my rants about AI (not the technology itself, but how it is being adopted) into this topic. Let me stop steering the discussion further. I do think the fact that we could recover Herculaneum papyrus like this is amazing!
It could be argued that AI is the first step in 2000+ years towards addressing this specific problem.
Like ... a lot? Now if RFC 2549 had been around back then you could get the same point across without trying to describe how information, rather than nectar, might flow through the equivalent of a butterfly's proboscis that happens to stretch around the world.
I do not believe this for a minute.
> But I think they would be more surprised by how we managed to invent things ... which destroy our brain.
what kind of destroy are you talking about?
modern living changes brain development, it doesn't destroy things -- the brain is an ever-molding plastic object for that very reason, situations change and require different access to different things; unless by destroy you want to talk only of neuron number ; jury's out on that.
'Ancient societies' , let's talk Greek since you brought up Plato, ate and drank lead -- both accidentally and on purpose. destroyed their teeth on rock grit from stone mills and had zero ability to deal with the resulting abscesses aside from brutal surgeries without anesthetic, sterilization or antibiotics , inhaled burning wood smoke indoors just about everywhere, believed that the majority of natural happenings were omens , believed the womb caused women to 'wander', requiring infantilization and control of anyone with one, trained their militarizes through starvation and beating and rape/pederasty relationships were common place and even legally bound.
so, actually I think that ancient societies would be more surprised by the fact that nearly every one of their ritualistic ways of dealing with the problems that arose in their life was either 1) ineffective, 2) harmful, 3) deadly.
but first you'll have to convince them of what their brain even does ..
Our imagination is capped by the society we are raised in, not by technology or magic. Trends like retrofuturism are interesting and follow this as well. A future prediction often speaks more about the current time in which the prediction is being made than the hypothetical future it imagines. We never see how soceity can change mostly
By definition we can't, since your premise is that:
> future humans with machines made of materials unimaginable to Aristocreon
So if a sci-fi writer wrote such a thing it'd be deemed ridiculous by the readers of our time.
I once had a sci-fi idea (I'm sure I'm not the first one who came up with this though):
> In an apocalyptic situation, humans decide to encode our whole knowledge base into bacteria DNA so it can be preserved and passed on.
> Then during the process, the scientists find that there is already another species' knowledge base encoded in the DNA, and save the world by utilizing the it.
It's quite far stretched from our current capabilities, but still totally imaginable.
They do, commonly, if you were to consider we may appear as nearly alien to Aristocreon and also consider that our contemporary idea of aliens as portrayed in sci-fi could just be humans of the future.
The scribes were actively copying the books, this is a continuous preservation process that's familiar to everyone, it's the same thing that talking about the bees and the birds covers. It requires expending continuous effort (and funding), and planning ahead. It's toil. And, as you noted in your last sentence, it not only allows for errors, it affords errors. Translation is an act of interpretation.
In contrast, recovering text from 2000 year old charred embers is cultural equivalent of resurrection. It's like finding an ancient human frozen in a block of ice/ancient cryopod, and thawing them - which itself is a scientifically plausible subset of bringing back the dead.
I'm not sure what analogies would be best to explain that to people from 2000 years ago. Food preservation? Or hoping they can conceptualize thawing a person who fell into an icy lake indefinite amount of years earlier?
The "selfish gene" perspective is that genes are the information, and life is just a mechanism for "scribes" to continuously copy over the text to propagate that information, with a little twist that the information itself plays active part in creating scribes (neatly self-referential, biology is).
Problem: in this analogy, humans are books. We'd very much like to last forever, even though the system around us only carries about preserving some patterns inscribed in us, that we couldn't really care less about ourselves. Hence the conflict.
And in our industry, a lot of big steps were done in the 60's and 70's with the semiconductor, computers, and everything that came with it.
On "Do we have imagination" - I think you are being to hard too on humankind. The answer for me is "yes, certainly", because that's exactly what these researchers imagined and then did. Bravo to them!
I bet they can, but the danger is that if it's too far away from what we can fathom right now, it's no longer sci-fi but esoterics or something - going from fun to weird. Most science fiction is written in concepts we can understand today.
Sure they can, but as one of them once opined: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
What we cannot do, is guess which things so different from our world are, and are not, magic. Are the probabilities in quantum mechanics themselves quantised?
Is there an island of stability for fundamental particles, as distantly related to the gap between the electron and tau as silicon wafers are to the gap between titanium dioxide sand and silicon dioxide sand, such that we could use them to create conducting plates fine enough, that they could be placed close enough together, that by the Casimir effect we could construct a macroscopic object with overall negative mass?
Will we ever have a engineering-quality definition of consciousness, or be limited to the kind of pre-paradigmatic thinking that had Diogenes presenting a plucked chicken in response to Plato defining man as a "featherless biped"?
Will we destroy the earth in a way that preserves all the information, and find our minds resurrected a million years hence by strange alien beings?
Fig 5, page 19: https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0207057
Put both together and call it a TARDIS.
Pantheon.
Read ancient texts and they were largely like us, sometimes to a shockingly large degree when considering some aspects of the past, and in many different parts of the world. So I see no reason to think that it'd be fundamentally different for somebody from one of those eras.
There are lots of very smart folks working on incredible things, they just aren't as loud.
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.
It's also well known that surviving texts survived because they were copied again and again on costly animal skin during the Middle Ages, by monks who had to make a choice and naturally favored topics that were of most interest to them.
This could quite literally change everything.
[0] https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2021/09/25/are-there-more-...
So we can just get ChatGPT to fill in the blanks.
Heterodoxy (or really, orthodoxy) wasn't really a thing in 79ad, and you're not likely to find much of it in the private library of a wealthy Roman's vacation home. The only forbidden work you're going to see from that era is stuff critical of the emperor.
That said, they had limited resources. This is very cool
The exception though would be Greek literature. Greek literacy collapsed in the early medieval era and a large catalogue was probably just scrapped or discarded before even being collected in Monasteries. Herculaneum could represent a legitimate treasure trove in that regard.
Or of technology- steam power, mechanical computation (like the Antikythera mechanism, which is the only known example of such a thing until 1300 years later), mechanized production, mining techniques, etc
And that's just one thing, who knows what else those old Greeks/Phoenicians/etc were kicking about.
What dodecahedra were for.
A Post-Great Solar Flare of 2484 Step Brothers DVD Has Been Decoded
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.
So geeky, so cool !
You mean ropes and carts?
Any master stoneworker from any era should be able to carve stone to that level of precision given enough time and reason. The problem, as always, is that there is usually very little reason to put in that amount of time and effort when you can get 90% as good for 50% the effort.
But also there are accurately hewn stones all over the world from many eras of history. It is not unique or special in any way.
The pyramid stones also aren't generally that accurate in an absolute sense. They just fit really well together. The vast majority aren't particularly flat or square, but have been worked to mate with their neighbors, which is a very different and far more mundane type of work. Some stones, particularly exposed interiors and the outer face of the casing stones were cut pretty accurately, but only the parts you can see. Inside they're usually pretty rough.
Ancient Egyptian stoneworking was impressive, even at the time, but not spectacular or exceptional. Other civilizations throughout history have built to equal skill, if not scale. People in the West just get so caught up in the mystery of the ancient Egypt myth that they think it's magical ancient lost technology. It was just regular human labor and skill, but a whole hell of a lot more of it applied in one spot than anything we can imagine today.
I only recently learned that there are the equivalent of graffiti tags left by different work crews within usually inaccessible chambers that boast the respective team's pride. The discovery did away with the earlier assumption that it was all slaves.
My dentist is pretty good at doing this too, by putting marking paper between my teeth and having me bite down. I wonder if a similar technique could be used:
Have the blocks close together, constrained to only move on a single axis by rails or whatever. Drape a thin sheet of material over one of the blocks, the non-moving one (perhaps it's an already-placed one?) Maybe it's something that visibly shows when it's crushed, or maybe it's coated with the blood of the powerless. Smash the other block into it. Pull them apart and look where they made contact. If it's mostly everywhere, done. If not, grind down or chip out the parts that touched. Repeat until you run out of innocents.
To do the very last block, you'd have to meld two sides, remove a block, fix up the other side, and then put it back in. Which might make this testable.
But I'm just pulling stuff out of my nether orifice.
https://www.ericweinhoffer.com/blog/the-whitworth-three-plat...
But I think it would be vastly more difficult to grind two massive stone blocks against each other than to just ram one against the other. Not unless you stacked them, anyway, and if you stacked them I'm not sure if you could move the top one side to side in order to do the grinding. Maybe with some kind of grit, I don't know. Still seems harder.
Also, grinding methods end up removing more material (bad for teeth!), and I would expect more overall physical work to be done in order to remove that material (bad for massively heavy stone blocks).
As for making them flat, that seems unnecessary to me. But then, I'm not a pharaoh. (Even for a pharaoh, it seems like only the seems would need to be straight. Nobody could tell about the faces after assembly.)
Then again, after some quick researching, it seems like there's a good chance that the well-fitting blocks (which are not all of them) may have been cast out of a concrete-like slurry, not hewn.
How does ASML make the most modern chips? You mean light and mirrors?
How much of the translators bias makes these seem like academic papers instead of social media posts.
Latin is also a very rich language and this is no snippet.
Translation is always hard, especially from a couple thousand years ago BUT this kind of translation comes with a lot of confidence.
For anyone who wants to read ancient texts, there are bilingual editions, for example those of the "Loeb library".
The translations that omit the original text are just for the people who want to have some idea about the content, but do not care about the correctness of the translation.
With a bilingual edition, it is easy to understand the original text even with relatively little knowledge about the original language.
The original text is important because frequently the translator is forced to introduce inaccuracies in the translation, because of the absence of exact equivalents in the target language, which would require a long explanation of the original meaning, instead of just a translated sentence.
Especially misleading are translations where several distinct ancient words are translated using the same English word, so some nuances are lost.
Equally confusing are the cases when the translator chooses to translate the same ancient word by different English words, because even if the meaning of a word may depend on the context, many translators fail to judge correctly the context, because they may lack specialized knowledge so their guesses are not necessarily better than of the readers who may be less competent in linguistics, but more competent in the science or technology needed to understand the context. Better translators prefer to use a one-to-one mapping between words, which makes it easier for the readers to discover the meaning intended by the ancient writer, after seeing multiple examples of usage.
To think that there is some sort of absolute truth of how something ought to be translated is IMHO just not reality. Especially when it comes to texts that not only were oral literature long before being written down but we of course have no copies of the originals (whatever original means in this context), but only transcriptions of transcriptions of...
Take Beowulf for one. While perhaps Shippeys translation is very much faithful to the copy we have, is it "better" (whatever that means...) than Tolkiens? or Heaneys? Could we say what the poet would have liked more had they sat here in 2026 and read them all? Of course not and having a multitude of different translations is what we need to fully enjoy these texts (since not all will be able to learn the different ancient greek dialects, latin, old english, sumerian, etc., etc. I'm saying this as someone who is now studying ancient greek).
* ἐκ- = “out,” “thoroughly,” “to the end”
* πονέω = “to labor,” “to toil,” “to work hard”
> * ἐκ- = “out,” “thoroughly,” “to the end”
ἐκ is more motion away from something. It's often an intensifier in verb compounds but not really as a standalone preposition.
Ancient Greek is a very different language from English. I've found people who try to brute force it by looking up individual words without a knowledge of the grammar end up with a worse understanding of a text that someone who just reads in translation.
While I step through the valley of the shadow of death,
I contemplate my life and perceive that nothing remains.
For I have hurled weapons and laughed for so long that
Even to my mother, my mind appears to have departed.
Yet I have deceived no one except him who was worthy of it;
For me to be held as a coward—that indeed is unheard of.
Beware what you speak and where you set out,
Lest you and your companions be outlined in chalk.
Casual letters and graffiti would be closer to tweets.
Have also heard of graffiti being cited as how people talked, but dunno about that. Our graffiti is definitely not how we talk.
Beautifully ironic, that we find this message.
A thought: I guess the days of scratch off lottery tickets are numbered?
Apparently they did CT scans of closed books and read the content. Polevoy, Dmitry V., et al. "From tomographic reconstruction to automatic text recognition: the next frontier task for the artificial intelligence." Fifteenth International Conference on Machine Vision (ICMV 2022). Vol. 12701. SPIE, 2023. https://iris.unive.it/bitstream/10278/3687069/1/Albertin_et-...
So yeah, but lottery companies probably make it harder by engineering against it.
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.
- Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8 Year 0. Ish. :}
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?
“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…”
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.
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.
We are not associated with them, but they're a team of scholars that hosted an open challenge to do automated translation of Akkadian texts. Their first competition ended a few months ago but I believe they plan on hosting another at some point focused on doing image recognition to help speed up the transcription and translation of the tablets that you mentioned.
But that said, my understanding, very likely wrong, was that those were mostly tax records and other lists - which don't fire my imagination in quite the same way as works of philosophy and literature snatched (almost literally) from the flames of history.
Now, why should I be more interested in the mesopotamian tablets? (Not sarcasm, I'm interested)
Remarkably, these figures and their writings, dating from ~2300 BC, were as distant from Julius Caesar as he is to us, and yet they played a major role in shaping our world, for instance by setting the early foundations for Judeo-Christian thinking (examples: the flood story, Enheduanna's laments, etc). So we have every reason to be interested in them.
It would, of course, be great to do both. But my point is that it is going to be much harder to attract funders, participants, press coverage, and so on for reading Mesopotamian tablets than for reading Greek or Roman papyri excavated from Piso’s villa in Herculaneum.
This may be interesting if you are curious about what Philodemos wrote — or how previous generations of scholars approached the work.
Great work everyone!
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...
EDIT: Read some more into this. From Wikipedia and its sources:
> In 1969, Marcello Gigante founded the creation of the International Center for the Study of the Herculaneum Papyri (Centro Internazionale per lo Studio dei Papiri Ercolanesi; CISPE). With the intention of working toward the resumption of the excavation of the Villa of the Papyri, and promoting the renewal of studies of the Herculaneum texts, the institution began a new method of unrolling. Using the 'Oslo' peeling method, the CISPE team separated individual layers of the papyri. One of the scrolls exploded into 300 parts, and another did similarly but to a lesser extent.
> The results were mixed: one of the scrolls literally exploded (into more than 300 bits) during the "peeling" and attempts to put the scraps back together gave little hope for success. The second - PHerc.Paris.2 -, on the other hand, had survived in a slightly less fragmented state.
So this was new science being done on the possibility of unrolling the scrolls and piecing together information from the fragments. Whether the fragments from PHerc. 1667 was decoded I'm not sure. The work has been digitized (and photographed with specific wavelengths of light where the ink is more distinguishable), but I couldn't figure out if it was open to the public anywhere.
Another interesting part: > In 1756, Abbot Piaggio, conserver of ancient manuscripts in the Vatican Library, used a machine he also invented, to unroll the first scroll, which took four years (millimeters per day). The results were then copied (since the writing disappeared: see above), reviewed by Hellenist academics, and then corrected once more, if necessary, by the unrolling/copying team.
So it's not like they never got anything useful out of the scrolls but kept on trying anyways.
Take that, floppydisk!
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 can imagine the amateur archeologist, Picard himself, asking La Forge to read this fragile piece of history, and Geordi coming up with something just like this.
Yes, I still have hope for humanity, and a future like Star Trek.
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.
Emphasis mine.
"Unfortunately I cannot show it to you," replied the master, "because I burned it in my stove."
"I'm sorry but I don't believe you," said Woland. "You can't have done. Manuscripts don't burn." He turned to his cat. "Come on, Behemoth, let us have the novel."
– towards the end of The Master and Margarita. In the battle against both censorship & entropy, recovering a 2kyo text which was considered forever lost is an incredible victory.
Amazing!
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 …"(Btw, you can use the 'edit' link to fix things like this if the software gets a title change wrong.)
VERY COOL WORK!
They are in a variety of conditions - some of them people were able to "break" open and read. But the vast majority of what remains is too delicate and brittle to risk.
Fantastic work!