Elon Musk wants to reveal the Herculaneum papyri

How the most advanced technology in Artificial Intelligence can help reveal to us one of the most valuable treasures of antiquity, of ancient Rome specifically, in the year 79 after Christ, there was a catastrophic eruption, Vesuvius entered the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, in the latter there was a rich Villa with a notable library.

When it was hit by the ashes and emanations of the volcano, the papyri of the library were burned, but not destroyed, the papyri were charred, but whole, inscribed in the same position in which they had been left by their owner almost 2000 years ago and inside are the texts that are surely from works that we do not know, we have very little data on the classical works of the Roman and Greek times.

The owner of the library was a very notable politician in Rome, he collected and was a great fan of Greek philosophy, so here we could find a little of everything.

Elon Musk has gotten into this story and wants to invest several million and apply a new Artificial Intelligence to be able to read them, but why is there so much interest in the content of these papyri, what secrets does it hold from ancient Rome.

Charles III of Spain supported archaeological investigations that were the first to be carried out with scientific criteria, they were not simply looters, they were people who studied the finds, in fact they were the ones who found 1785 fragments of ancient papyrus rolls that represent about 1000 original volumes and were charred and blackened by the heat and this made them very fragile, in fact, from then until today some of them have been lost because they tried to open them to be able to read them even if it was just gluing a piece to them. little piece as if it were a puzzle, but when you try to open them they crumble like snow.

Until now, what we tried to do with the parchments was to cut them in half, a vertical cut was made, which already caused us to lose a large part of the material and the inner layers were unfolded to try to put them together little by little and then try to read the text that was in those writings, the method was very primitive and evidently it turned out more bad than good.

It is the largest library preserved in the Greco-Roman world, we do not have the library of Alexandria, we do not have anything from the great library of Pergamon, nor from the libraries that would have been in Rome, but we have this a library that belonged to a Roman statesman, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesonius who was Julius Caesar's father-in-law, he was certainly a big shot but there were many more, imagine all the libraries that those people must have and They have surely lost and big or small.

Keep in mind that what we have from the classical era are mostly copies of copies made during the Middle Ages, the original texts are very few but very few, hundreds perhaps thousands of plays, works of philosophy, of science have been lost, imagine that it could be in that library; the treatises of Archimedes, the design of his machines or the works of Hipparchus who was the first to propose the heliocentric theory and calculate that the sun was much larger than the earth, from him we have only received comments made by other wise men.

How much we could discover if we could read those scrolls, but attempts to open them have ended very badly; At the University of Kentucky they used x-ray tomography and computer vision for the first time and a few years ago they managed to read a Dead Sea scroll, the Dead Sea scrolls are older than these, a scroll that specifically contained text from Leviticus.

Now what we are trying to do is apply the same technology, that is, tomography, and after an Artificial Intelligence manages to read the scrolls from the Herculaneum library, in fact, there is already a challenge that is dedicated precisely to that, it even gives prizes for computer science students or engineers who manage to improve that Artificial Intelligence to be able to read the texts.

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