There is all sorts of amazing science happening in the world right now, and as a layperson I have a "hot list" of probably a dozen different topics that can make me jump up and down when there's a new announcement. But the Herculaneum scrolls, for some reason, are a special case. I get just unreasonably excited whenever they make any progress.<p>I know that in the end this is "just" an ancient library of Epicurean philosophy and will probably have a bunch of redundant copies of stuff that is really only of interest to (the very few remaining) classicists. But I have looked at a lot of data in my time, and I just keep thinking that the data set is big enough that there will be a few outliers -- maybe one copy of a previously lost Aristophanes comedy that a friend sent the librarian as a joke or birthday present or something and was stuck in the back under a pile of philosophy.
I can't be the only one who tried to figure out what this new 306B model revealed for the first time in 2000 years?
It's really surprising to me that we have these language fragments that exist without any samples referencing the language itself.<p>I suppose for very young languages there wasn't a lot of need to specify that something was written in one vs the other given that any reader could just plainly see it with their eyes and perhaps didn't have a lot of cause to have "well, in Russian they X whereas in Japanese they Y" conversations.<p>But like...imagine a remote future in which we have only SMS fragments that read "you dtf" and "sup" and this weird purple thing with a green tip we're certain was a vegetable next to what we're absolutely convinced is a rendering of a butt and that's the entire corpus of the ancient XIZZY103.4 langauge.
I love the human sense (or vision) that we could find these in the 1750s as carbonized logs and know that we should keep and protect them - that we miiiiight be able to read them someday.
I hope that in the Herculean and Pompey library’s at least some early Christian texts turn up as well.<p>Of all the “new testament” books we only have fragments form the first to the sixth century. It’s only with the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Alexandrinus from around 650? That you find a complete Bible.
I'm reminded of the human genome project here - in that case there was a geometric ramp-up that meant we went from 1 or 2% sequenced to 100% really quickly. This sort of doubling when you can get it is pretty magical.<p>I'd like to imagine that we'll get something similar here sometime in the next ten years -- I understand there are (tens of?) thousands of these scrolls still to be scanned much less unrolled. Just an incredibly cool thing to be doing.
Amazing.<p>> I am Liam Warner, from northern England. I’m a freelance software engineer/consultant that has worked in areas such as video games, healthcare, and broadcasting technology.<p>> I am Nicola Bodill from Australia. I have a BA in Latin and Ancient Greek, and am a current MA student at the University of Sydney, working on a critical edition of a 2000-year-old Gandharan Buddhist birch-bark manuscript.<p>Congrats to Nicola and Liam!
"Sufficiently advanced technology" indeed<p>(<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws</a>)
Amazing work. Makes you wonder what else is out there holding a record of the past, with us too primitive to read it.
While reading, I thought it might be a 306B parameter model until I say 2000 years ago
It’s amazing that they can reconstruct any text at all from those scrolls.
I was a member of ASP (American Society of Papyrologists) and their journal is phenomenal, for anyone interested. Anyway, an important piece of information about this effort is that it's conceived that there is a second, "main" library yet to be excavated, and that the library that was found was merely a fore-room to this, which fits with the design and location of the library and that the owner of the villa was a patron of epicurean authors, which constitute the bulk of the contents of the known library. Italian authorities have refused to allow any further excavations, and I seem to remember that one of the stipulations of authorizing any such work is that it becomes possible to read the existing papyri non-destructively. So this is very cool and important work.
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Pherc 306B A12B when?