A 2,000-Year-Old Scroll Finally Speaks, Thanks to a Spare RTX 4090
Writing seen in PHerc. 306B, for the first time in 2000 years
Buried by Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 and unreadable since its excavation in the 1750s, PHerc. 306B has yielded its first legible letters. Freelance software engineer Liam Warner and classics student Nicola Bodill won the $50K First Letters Prize after a field of 25 submissions, isolating a papyrus sheet deep in the compressed scroll and recovering enough ink to read the sequence τὸ δι' αὑτὸ αἱρετόν — "that which is in itself desirable." The find also fixes which half of the scroll was the upper section.
Each new letter saved from the 'innumerabilis annorum series et fuga temporum' ('innumerable series of years and flight of time') is precious, so it's very exciting and meaningful work, if often painstakingly slow.
- baoooooooooooo
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.
- ldite
"Sufficiently advanced technology" indeed
- vessenes
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.
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.