Decoded! Ancient Greek word uncovered from scorched scroll buried by Mount Vesuvius eruption!
It’s a breakthrough discovery! For the first time ever, an AI analysis has successfully decoded an entire word from a scorched and carbonized scroll that survived the deadly eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. And what’s the word? It’s “πορφύραc” in ancient Greek, which means “purple dye” or “clothes of purple.”
The scroll is one of many that were considered unreadable when they were found in the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum back in the 1750s. But thanks to the Vesuvius Challenge, a machine-learning competition for deciphering the Herculaneum papyri, a 21-year-old computer science student named Luke Farritor managed to crack the code and won a cool $40,000 for his detective work.
The challenge, organized by Brent Seales, a professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky, provided contestants with software and thousands of 3D X-ray images of two rolled-up scrolls and three papyrus fragments. With the help of prior work and observations from other contestants, Farritor used machine learning to uncover the elusive word. And he wasn’t the only one! Youssef Nader, an Egyptian biorobotics graduate student in Berlin, also discovered the same word independently and won $10,000.
The discovery has thrilled experts in the field. Papyrologists have examined the entries from both students and expressed their excitement about the results. They believe that being able to read whole words rather than just sequences of letters is a major breakthrough. They’re confident that with further analysis, they will be able to uncover more about the text, including the topic, the scribe, and the date.
Purple dye was highly valued in the Roman Empire because it was rare and had royal connotations. It was made from the glands of sea snails, so the term could refer to the color itself, robes, high-ranking individuals who could afford the dye, or even the molluscs.
Excavations of the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum have revealed numerous treasures, including these incomprehensible scrolls. The papyri were preserved because they were buried in dirt, mud, water, and gases from the volcano, then desiccated by the heat and carbonized. It’s a miracle they survived!
While this discovery is astounding, there’s more to come. Additional prize money is up for grabs for those who can decipher more passages and accurately detect ink from the papyri’s 3D X-ray scans. Who knows what other secrets these ancient scrolls hold?
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