Charred scrolls from Herculaneum can't be opened easily, but X-ray scanning can reveal their contents.Credit: UK Photo
Charred scrolls from Herculaneum can't be opened easily, but X-ray scanning can reveal their contents.Credit: UK Photo
For $40K, I’ll read TWO words!
These “arkeonews” links do not seem to work.
My understanding is that there are a huge number of undesciphered clay texts from the middle east that remain undecisphered for lack of scholars.
A couple of ai contests would probably get most of them deciphered. Why? they already have a number of texts deciphered and translated. So it wouldn’t be too tough to train the ai on these texts to read the unread stuff.
I keep hoping they will find some of Claudius’s histories, Carthage, Etruscans. His supposed history of his life, that murderous family. Some of the lost Livy docs. Hoping there was a good library over there in Herculaneum.
They have just started with this stuff. So far it’s they found the word ‘purple’. Gee it could be a while...
That is by far the most constructive thing i’ve heard about in the last month.
Finally!
We’ll get a first-hand description of how Dr. Who saved the last Pompeians...
A machine-learning algorithm, called the Joseph Smith Project ...
Fascinating.
If these are the same scrolls I saw in a documentary (— but I think they were from Pompeii — ) they were rolled up, sitting in cubby holes, as they did back then, and flash-burned to a crisp — but no oxygen meant no decaying. Eighteenth- or nineteenth-century scholars tried to unroll them, only to have them crumble like newspaper ashes in their hands. So they put them aside — to await better technology.
Some fragments did get put in a museum, under glass.
The first word was “Epstein,” oh, and we can all guess what the next three were. :>)
Correction:
The first word was “Epstein,” and we can all guess what the next three were. :>)
Oh look, some a-hole put "fakery" in the keywords.
