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Roman Resources

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the project to decipher the library of crushed and carbonized papyrus scrolls from Herculaneum

Progress has been quite amazing here.

For reference, what one of these scrolls looks like,

2000x-1.jpg
it's a tightly packed, compressed charred mess and attempting to unroll it mechanically however carefully ...
... leaves behind crumbling flakes and not much more.
But somewhere inside there are remains of text.
And there are hundreds of these, and perhaps thousands more still buried.

Since autumn, the 'Vesuvius challenge' have gone from this ... a single word deciphered out of a rolled up crushed carbonized scroll

a-999x-999.jpg

to entire paragraphs that while not perfectly sharp, are decipherable
-999x-999.jpg
This makes it plausible that in fact the library of scrolls will be accessible.

There's a compact write-up from the project here https://scrollprize.org/grandprize
and a more journalistic treatment https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-ai-unlock-ancient-world-secrets/

This I'd say is one area where machine learning aka AI can deliver spectacular results, and an important thing to consider is, there's no language model involved.

That's important because there is the obvious caveat, if humans can't really see the writing, and can't look inside the scroll, how do we know the AI isn't just making something up that seems plausible?

The algorithms, of which there are competing ones that are all open sourced, are basically looking for the presence or not of ink traces, or at best individual characters, but don't know anything about Greek vocabulary, grammar, the topics of Epicurean philosophy etc.
The entire approach is much more related to medical imagery analysis than ChatGPT et al. and that approach is how the entire Herculaneum scroll decoding effort started (CT scans, segmentation, this is all familiar from medical 3D work as it has existed for decades). And to answer the chicken-egg question ... yes there are some flakes of scrolls where the human eye could recognize letters, or patterns of ink residue, and that's what enabled the first training iterations.

And anyways the results the machine-learning nerds come up with get piped right to teams of established classicists who can contextualize.
If they were trying to decipher unknown writing systems or languages things indeed would be more difficult to verify...
 
The fact that this matches the Jehohanan heel bone found in Jerusalem; would make it seem likely that nailing the heels to the side of the stipes was the most common method.

View attachment 1415594View attachment 1415595
Hi Naraku,

the heel bones are a very exciting find.

But there is still what we got from Seneca:
Seneca the Younger wrote: "I see crosses there, not just of one kind but made in many different ways: some have their victims with head down to the ground; some impale their private parts; others stretch out their arms on the gibbet".

Josephus may also wrote about the crucifixion, but I don't think we can consider it as confirmed.

What Seneca wrote is very well possible (it arouses me, so I hope that what he wrote is a fact :D).

Would'nt it be boring as hell, if all the victims have been crucified in one and the same way?
I'm hoping that wasn't the case and I trust the roman creativity and their urge to entertain.

Why they buried the victim Jehohannan and the nameless person in Great Britain is hard to tell. Wasn't it part of the execution that the victims stayed on the crosses until the bones fell down?
Maybe these two victims have been subjects of executions on a more private basis, thus got nailed by semi-professionals?
On the other hand, coincidence twice is unlikely.
 
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