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Title of work deciphered in sealed Herculaneum scroll via digital unwrapping
- sauerweb 1y agoThis 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.
- philosophty 1y agoSeems 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.
- TrapLord_Rhodo 1y agoFrom 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.
- tokai 1y agoBut 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.
- flir 1y ago> 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.
- bawolff 1y agoThere 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.
- ysavir 1y agoThe 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.
- tourmalinetaco 1y agoIt’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.
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- philosophty 1y agoThese 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.
- JoBrad 1y agoSo is the “pagan” moniker a way of dating the work to before the rise of Christianity with the Roman Empire?
- colechristensen 1y agoTo 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.
- mkoubaa 1y agoJust 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
- colechristensen 1y agoIt's not a technical term, calling things that aren't Christian "pagan" especially from before Christianity was prominent is silly and inaccurate.
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- detourdog 1y agoWould 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.
- wizzwizz4 1y agoAbrahamic (= worshipping the God of Abraham) is the word I've most often seen used.
- detourdog 1y agoThat works for me but I'm still curious what a pagan is.
- wizzwizz4 1y agoAnyone 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.)
- detourdog 1y agoThank you. This is a nice concise answer. The best part is geo-location of the term.
- TrapLord_Rhodo 1y agoyes, it would. Monotheistic would be a much better term as that's how the people at the time viewed the divide.
- lazide 1y agoIn the first century CE, Christianity was barely on anyone’s radar. It’s indeed very odd to frame it this way?
- permo-w 1y agoit 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
- mensetmanusman 1y agoAlso, Christians were accused and publicly executed for being atheists, since they didn’t believe in the various polytheistic Gods.
- bawolff 1y agoIn 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.
- renewiltord 1y agoI 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.
- andrepd 1y agoIn 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).
- troad 1y agoI 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.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoThe 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.
- troad 1y agoIt 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.
- DoctorOetker 1y ago> 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..
- mattlondon 1y agoThey 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.
- qingcharles 1y agoAnd still plenty more to be dug up, allegedly.
- bornfreddy 1y agoActually, 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.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philodemus Neat
- qoez 1y agoThis is awesome but I get so worried that we're just hallucinating meaning in those little splotches.
- NitpickLawyer 1y ago> 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...
- suddenlybananas 1y ago>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.
- LegionMammal978 1y agoThe 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.
- anabab 1y agoIf they have learned on ink areas shaped as letters, what prevents them from having a bias towards such shapes?
- webdevver 1y agothey say they deciphered it - ok, so what does it say!? the most important information is omitted... so annoying.
- throwanem 1y agoThey identified it by title as a copy of a known work. This information appears very early in the article.
- number6 1y agoThe Greek writing visible in the image reads: ΦΙΛΟΔΗΜΟΥ ΠΕΡΙ ΦΥΣΕΩΣ This translates into English as: Of Philodemus, On Nature
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- seydor 1y agoΠΕΡΙ ΚΑΚΙΩΝ Ά About vices - part A
- sanxiyn 1y agoInterestingly, as written, it is ΚΑΚΙωΝ not ΚΑΚΙΩΝ.
- stevula 1y agoOriginally 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- renewiltord 1y agoIt 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.
- xpose2000 1y agoThere 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw44V49Fz9U
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago"Video unavailable The uploader has not made this video available in your country" So much for the global internet.
- martinpw 1y agoAt 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-herculaneum-scroll-seen-first-time-79-ad 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?
- wizzwizz4 1y agoIf 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.
- alnwlsn 1y agoMaybe 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.
- popctrl 1y agoThis 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?
- worewood 1y agoMy 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.
- bornfreddy 1y agoWell, 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 https://scrollprize.org/jobs
- verditelabs 1y agoThey 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.
- blackstache 1y agoSorry to hear this happened as this shouldn't have been lost. I'll make sure we get in touch with you.
- ashoeafoot 1y agoThis 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 ?
- meindnoch 1y ago>This really is a herculean act One might even say it's Herculanean ;)
- helsinki 1y agoBrent 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.
- thewanderer1983 1y agoInstead 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?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- FlyingSnake 1y ago> 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.
- seydor 1y agoIt'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