* papyrologist at the Federico II University of Naples. You used AI to decipher the Herculaneum papyri.
The German archaeologist Winckelmann effectively called them “goat horns.” Before him, the Bourbon excavators who had found them in front of them had mistaken them for pieces of burnt wood, fishing or hunting nets, pieces of canvas, and had thrown several away. It was then understood that he was in front of us an ancient library is miraculously saved. These blackened cylinderscompressed and twisted, emerged for the first time in 1752 from the remains of a luxurious Roman villa located at the time along the Campania coast of Herculaneum and then buried by over twenty meters of lava mixed with mud following the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD
The discovery There is a new hope to read the Herculaneum papyri carbonized in 79 AD by Pier Luigi Pisa 17 October 2023
Carbonization was the library’s curse, but at the same time its salvation: if the papyri had not been carbonised, they would have undergone natural decay which the organic material is intended for in the presence of humidity. From the first findings, however, a problem arose: how to open and read these scrolls compact and at the same time so fragile? Over the centuries, various methods have been tested, some with good results. But the loss of material was the inevitable price to pay to read part of the text.
For about twenty years now every mechanical process has been abandoned and in the collection of Herculaneum papyri, preserved largely in the National Library of Naples (but also in France, England, Holland), there are still over six hundred scrolls and pieces of scrolls never opened.
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For almost as many years, University of Kentucky Computer Science professor Brent Seales had been looking for a solution to reveal the text of those unrolled scrolls without touching them. After promising preliminary results, to accelerate the achievement of results and resolve the difficulties that still hindered him, in March 2023, Seales, with Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, launched an international competition, the Vesuvius Challenge. The three very young winners who won the prize ($700,000), Luke Farritor, Youssef Nader e Julian Schilliger, using artificial intelligence, they have revealed the ink on a continuous strip over a meter long, isolated and virtually carried out from within a Herculaneum scroll preserved at the Institut de France in Paris. They came out over fifteen columns and more than two thousand Greek characters that they were deciphered by the Challenge team of papyrologists, of which the two Italians are part, one is me and the other is Gianluca Del Mastro (University of Campania L. Vanvitelli), members of the International Center for the Study of the Herculaneum Papyri ‘M. Giant’. This scroll still reserves many surprises and, already looking into perspective, the combination of artificial intelligence and human intelligence on the rest of the collection promises to reveal never-before-read Greek philosophical texts and who knows what Latin works.
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