Fragile and charred: thanks to AI, scientists deciphered 2,000-year-old papyri
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Scientists have discovered in the Herculaneum papyri several complete passages from a text almost 2,000 years old. They were able to study fragile papyri thanks to artificial intelligence.
Thanks to computer technology, the researchers did not damage the artifacts, writes CNN.
According to the University of Kentucky, among some of the texts, papyrologists discovered the works of the philosopher Epicurus, the poet Philodemus of Hadar, and the Latin text of Seneca the Elder.
The ancient Herculaneum papyri are considered to be among the most inaccessible damaged manuscripts. In the year 79, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius destroyed the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum, due to which nearly 1,100 papyrus rolls were charred and buried under a layer of ash.
| Photo: University of Kentucky |
Work on deciphering the scrolls was undertaken Luke Farritora computer science student at the University of Nebraska, Yusef NaderPhD student in biorobotics from the Free University of Berlin and Julian Schilligera robotics student at the Swiss Technical University of Zurich.
They used a “virtual unfolding” technique: in the process, the team used computer tomography, which worked like an X-ray for the deformed papyrus. Later, they virtually aligned the papers, and artificial intelligence read the ink.
This is the first team that was able to decipher 85% of the characters from four passages of one papyrus.
“If you look at the level of vocabulary in these passages, there’s a really nuanced, intellectual conversation going on here. I’m just thrilled to be able to give scientists a full copy of these materials.”, – says the creator of the deployment method, Brent Seals. His laboratory has been deciphering texts for 20 years.
Previously, people also tried to decipher the scrolls, but the work did not bring great results. Only in the 19th century, about 300 papyri were separated by machine and some fragments were found, but the text remained illegible.
According to the Vesuvius Challenge, more than 2,000 symbols and some complete passages of texts have already been deciphered.
“It’s incredibly exciting to know that these things are now available and that we have a mechanism to read them — it’s going to create a whole field of classical studies.”says Brent Seals.
We will remind how two people from Aitiv taught artificial intelligence to decipher the text on an ancient scroll.
Anna Stopenko, UP. Life
Read also: Scientists “taught” AI to imitate human handwriting: it can write in English and French
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