Multi-spectral imaging technology is bringing a hoard of texts from antiquity back to life. I wonder if the hoard contains a copy of the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics, his missing treatise on comedy? Hopefully, it also contains ‘lesser works’ that would shed light on scenarios that were seriously considered by the relevant historical personalities, leading to possible alternative courses of history.

2013-12-19: Over 100 years ago, archaeologists discovered a 2 ka old trash dump near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, chock full of 1000s of ancient documents, and preserved by the desert and pure chance. From Wikipedia on Oxyrhynchus:

Because Egyptian society under the Greeks and Romans was governed bureaucratically, and because Oxyrhynchus was the capital of the 19th nome, the material at the Oxyrhynchus dumps included vast amounts of paper. Accounts, tax returns, census material, invoices, receipts, correspondence on administrative, military, religious, economic, and political matters, certificates and licenses of all kinds—all these were periodically cleaned out of government offices, put in wicker baskets, and dumped out in the desert. Private citizens added their own piles of unwanted paper. Because papyrus was expensive, paper was often reused: a document might have farm accounts on one side, and a student’s text of Homer on the other. The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, therefore, contained a complete record of the life of the town, and of the civilizations and empires of which the town was a part.

In the century since they were uncovered, only a small fraction of the 1000 briefcase-sized storage boxes of papyrus fragments have been edited and published. There are ongoing efforts to speed this up using multispectral imaging, high resolution CT scanning, and transcription by crowdsourcing.

2013-12-23: Using CT imaging at the micron instead of a millimeter scale to virtually unroll a scroll and bring the libraries of Herculaneum back to life.

However, unraveling was still a problem so scientists kept searching for a mechanism by which to examine the scrolls while they remained closed.

A computer science professor from the University of Kentucky thought he had the answer. Working with 2 preserved Herculaneum scrolls, Brent Seales used micro-CT imaging techniques to attempt to “virtually unroll a scroll.” Micro-CT works at a higher resolution than regular CT scans, operating on the much-smaller micron scale instead of a millimeter scale. Experiments on similar objects seemed promising.

2015-11-17: X-ray phase-contrast tomography

Hundreds of papyrus rolls, buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD and belonging to the only library passed on from Antiquity, were discovered 260 years ago at Herculaneum. These carbonized papyri are extremely fragile and are inevitably damaged or destroyed in the process of trying to open them to read their contents. In recent years, new imaging techniques have been developed to read the texts without unwrapping the rolls. Until now, specialists have been unable to view the carbon-based ink of these papyri, even when they could penetrate the different layers of their spiral structure. Here for the first time, we show that X-ray phase-contrast tomography can reveal various letters hidden inside the precious papyri without unrolling them.

2022-03-09: Now combine this with ML to make sense of text fragments.

Ancient history relies on disciplines such as epigraphy—the study of inscribed texts known as inscriptions—for evidence of the thought, language, society and history of past civilizations. However, over the centuries, many inscriptions have been damaged to the point of illegibility, transported far from their original location and their date of writing is steeped in uncertainty. Here we present Ithaca, a deep neural network for the textual restoration, geographical attribution and chronological attribution of ancient Greek inscriptions. Ithaca is designed to assist and expand the historian’s workflow. The architecture of Ithaca focuses on collaboration, decision support and interpretability. While Ithaca alone achieves 62% accuracy when restoring damaged texts, the use of Ithaca by historians improved their accuracy from 25% to 72%, confirming the synergistic effect of this research tool. Ithaca can attribute inscriptions to their original location with an accuracy of 71% and can date them to less than 30 years of their ground-truth ranges, redating key texts of Classical Athens and contributing to topical debates in ancient history. This research shows how models such as Ithaca can unlock the cooperative potential between artificial intelligence and historians, transformationally impacting the way that we study and write about one of the most important periods in human history.

2023-04-04: What we might find at Herculaneum

There would have been a great deal else. Literature, history, science. Epistolaries, miscellanies, essays. Memoirs, novels, biographies. Satires. The work of orators and poets. Philosophy and mathematics. Scientific studies and technical manuals. Dictionaries and encyclopedias; and more. For example, a prominent Latin collector near to Rome is likely to have had the epistolaries (published letter collections) of Cicero. While we already have copies of those, finding editions scribed within decades of his death would still be of considerable use. More importantly, medieval Christians chose not to preserve almost all ancient literature; so there could be epistolaries from other authors here, famous and obscure. And even poets and orators and novelists, besides being priceless to recover just in respect to the history of art, would also have commented on various subjects of importance, such as popular religion and events.