HAPPENING TODAY: At 4 p.m. (EST) on Thursday, Oct. 12, Brent Seales and partners will announce a major BREAKTHROUGH in the two-decade journey to uncover ancient wisdom and read the Herculaneum scrolls via livestream here: engr.uky.edu/live.
It seems that we may be looking at an accelerating process. One break-through leads to 2, leads to 4, and so. Every improvement leads to a better idea for the next step, which itself then lets you go back to earlier one in an iterative fashion. The ideal case would be an automated mechanism that can be crowd-clustered, just like the old SETI@Home or cancer research protein folding distributed systems where people can donate computer time.
The material sciences field is sometimes mind boggling...being able to read such ancient texts without even unrolling them is simply stunning as an achievement.
@@LightninSharples They said they identified it to be a section from the book of leviticus. So it's a bible/torah scroll. They got experts on hebrew for that clearly.
The CT scan already does much more precise discrimination in medicine. I'm honestly surprised that it took machine learning to do this, but I guess radiologists use contrast dye for a reason.
My late uncle, Allen Ross Scaife, was the classics professor who helped initiate this idea and set this whole process in motion. He died in 2008. He would be so proud to see how his work has continued beyond his life. Congratulations to professor Searles and his colleagues.
Finally! I’m local and saw the newspaper story 20 years ago about Dr. Seales idea and project. Periodically, I’ve wondered if they’d had any success. What a thrill it must have been to finally see that ink appear on a video screen! Brilliant and well done!
What if it turns out to be a bunch of multi level marketing publications. Get in on the ground floor and sell this revolutionary new olive oil based beauty creame.
It truly is astounding, the power of the human mind to combine technologies and solve problems in a way that seems impossible. It’s way beyond impressive.
@@thomasprislacjr.4063That'd be hilarious, but it would also be valuable in its own right. It would teach us stuff about the culture and economics of ancient Rome that we didn't know! Also, I bet you an MLM pamphlet would have more "casual" or "vulgar" Latin on it than the literature that we have. The way that people actually spoke is a gap in our knowledge that's been filled a bit through Pompeiian graffiti, but it'd be super interesting to have a longer-form text meant for the average person to read. How would the vocabulary, spelling, declensions and conjugations change - if at all??
This just gives me chills. As a middle-aged Graeco-Roman History nerd, I just hope I live long enough to see some revelations. The list of works that are lost and/or that we only know by reference is endless. Histories of the great authors from Livy to Procopius [EDIT: as someone pointed out, this would require a time machine: Procopius was, of course, several centuries later. I meant Polybius, the Graeco-Roman historian of the Republic era], maybe someone even managed to obtain a copy of Claudius' works on the Etruscans and his dictionary of the language. That alone would be a breakthrough that can hardly be described. That's before even the possibility of totally unknown works we've not even had the slightest idea existed. That includes plays and works of fiction. The Petronius family was said to have their home in this area - what if we could get more of the (in)famous Satyricon?
....Yes, like an initiation into Quantum Physics, brrrrr!? Just had my mind jolted here, wish I was part of this team, just a bit too elderly and remote though....
Wow. I am getting chills! As a 10-year-old, I was in Herculaneum in the early days of the exploration, and it always held magic for me. (schoolteacher parents on leave) My mom took me to the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the DeYoung in San Francisco with great excitement, etc. have had an interest 60 years. Yay!
It's about 2am, I'm stopped for a rest on a long drive in Australia and this popped up in my youtube feed. Absolutely gobsmacked. I can't wait to read more about your achievements. Congratulations on the work, and thanks for such a compelling short intro.
@@neatwheat At that time, one might benefit from eating more Vitamin A. Like get a can of pumpkin, water it down by 1 can, and make soup out of it with some fat calories for Vit. A absorption. Though, drinking Dandelion Leaf Tea does about the same, being high in Vitamin A. Just mind that it's high in Vitamin K, if you happen to be on Coumadin/Warfarin.
Years ago I read about the discovery of the scrolls. And how the scientists was storing them until the tech reached a level, so they could read them. I never thought it would happen in my lifetime. Amazing!
It adds new meaning to the Daniel 12 "4But you, Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book, until the time of the end. Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.” " But imagine a book that is actually sealed and cannot be opened until a later time.
There could be several 100 scrolls or more left in Pompei and Herculaneum. And now the tech is ready so we can read them. It could be texts from Archimedes. Or Historical data that could solve historical mysteries.
@OnTheThirdDay so you're saying one of the authors is named Daniel? Probably going to happen since there are 600 of them. But I don't think anything in any Bible is literal. Pretty sure it's talking about a non-literal book and a non-literal seal.
@@Kyle-nm1kh It was kinda a joke. The story in that part of the biok of Daniel is about a person named Daniel who sees visions and in the vision, toward the end, an angel tells him to write down what he saw and seal it up because the prophecy is not for his time but a later time. Take it or leave it. Make what you will of it. Now, given that context about an entirely different thing, the scrolls in this video are sealed by the ash and will LITERALLY not be able to be read until the time is ready (or more precisely, the technology is ready). This is what the OP was talking about and I thought I would make a joke.
@@OnTheThirdDay sorry I couldn't tell you were making a joke. I know there are a lot of Bible thumpers out there who literally think everything that happens is prophecy. Like Noah's ark was a literal ship, the garden of Eden was a literal garden, God created everything in literally 7 days (even though days are based around rotation of the planet). Like it's obviously not literal give me a break. Noah's ark was a database, the garden of eden was a library, God creates everything in 7 steps not days. The end of times is quite possibly, and likely (if you ask me), another non-literal concept.
Incredible, simply incredible. I would have loved just a little about what was actually written in the Herculaneum scrolls---more philosophy? Poetry? Or something as mundane as government records or an accounting of the wheat harvest?
@@brettclark8020 There are/were societies that did not recognize human sexuality as "pornography;" that's largely a more modern thing---modern being a relative term!
I used to work for a place that scanned in old documents, film, microfiche, microfilm, books, magazines, blueprints - name it, we scanned it. There were a lot of things that would crumble to dust if you tried to handle it. This technology is greatly needed! There are untold numbers of valuable records rotting away that need to be saved. We'd go into a local government buildings and find large boxes with half the things in them destroyed from sitting in some musty old basement.
Another example of how human ingenuity knows no bounds. This is a remarkable development, and promises to considerably enrich our understanding of Greco-Roman civilization.
Thank you for you and your teams' efforts! Unlocking our Graeco-Roman heritage from the Herculaneum library would be perhaps akin to resurrecting a portion of the Library of Alexandria. So, so important.
What would you say if someone came up with an algorithm that can exactly reconstruct sound from the traces it has left in hardening materials while they were hardening?
Amazing developments that were science fiction only 40 years ago! This is an exciting R&D project; I will be eagerly watching for updates. Congratulations on your historical success!
They are not mutually exclusive conditions so you may read it that way if you like. The adjective I used was more apt in that it isn't unnecessarily hyperbolic. @@HansDunkelberg1
This opens a lot of doors for archeologists and classical scholars, the knowledge lost at the burning of the library of Alexandria and other disasters may be possible to recover in part through other discovered texts that are put this process. Keep up the good work.
This is absolutely fascinating. I can't wait to see what future discoveries bring us. I graduated college in 1986, and the world is a whole lot different from back then. It is definitely changing at an accelerating pace.
The crazy thing is we already have an insane amount of ancient material we just lack the number of educated specialists to work on it so we have restoration and translations at a feasible pace. The scanning and AI symbol enhancement and ability to connect pieces of fragments will likely advance now pretty fast. We are likely gonna see because of this some of the most in volume and in substance biggest breakthroughs in the next decade. There is a massive cache of fragments I believe from Israel from an ancient dump site that has given us some of our biggest evidences for substantiating the bible and the problem is it takes some highly specialized papyrus translators/restoration specialists, and we've basically had all of them in the world working on these fragments for something like 50-100 years another documentary said working full time and they've only finished about something like 2% of the material. If refined in the next few years and applied to even that cache of fragments we'll have the most insane biggest break thorough of the modern era for this stuff.
Yeah, some areas of technology seem to be advancing at an accelerating pace in recent years. The stuff that is possible nowadays is incredible even from the perspective of just the year 2000. Just these mere 23 years ago, we didn't have decent digital cameras, no single full genome had been sequenced, CRISPR wasn't invented and gene editing was a purely theoretical concept, machine translation was still a pipe dream, streaming decent quality digital video was pretty much impossible, the prevalent lighting technology was still incandescent bulbs, AI was something only discussed in sci-fi, mobile phones were actually only phones, nothing else, and so on. We don't really acknowledge these things while they're happening around us, but once you take a step back, you realize how much has changed. The world we're living in now is so different from the world just a quarter of a century ago that a time traveler would run into serious adjustment problems. Going even further back, the world of today would be basically unrecognizable for someone from the year 1975. Really makes you wonder what things will be possible within our lifetime. Synthetically grown organs and limbs for transplantation? The alcubierre drive? Mind/machine interfaces? Atomic 3D printing? Nuclear fusion reactors? All of this doesn't seem as unrealistic within the next 30, 40, 50 years once you take that step back and put it into perspective, especially once you factor in how powerful and useful NLM AIs have become in the last two years and how much they could further accelerate advances.
This is absolutely epic! I can't wait for texts to start coming out and being translated! I also ponder what the authors of those texts would think of the idea of a civilization 2000 years after their time using what they would see as straight-up magic (in the Clarke sense) to recover their words.
@@jnhartonThat’s actually pretty plausible now that I think about it. They might just be pissed lol. But I doubt it, like today we can’t even fathom people still being around in 2k years let alone what they will be like, or if they will care to look us up in the archaeological record.
@@jnharton - That sounds like the framework of a Monty Python skit. Author of said scrolls played by John Cleese, "Sorry, rolled up? For 2,000 years. Right." *breathes deeply and looks at peers "...so glad you lot ENJOYED them!! To think I'd spent 22-hours a day for 20 years writing - worried about criticism - never giving thought to them staying rolled up for 2,000 years...SiLLy mE!!! I say LET the volcano erupt!...THAT'll teach you not to read my scrolls." In all seriousness though, it might have been copied numerous times - and this one surviving scrolls may just be one of those copies and not the original itself.
HAPPENING TODAY: At 4 p.m. (EST) on Thursday, Oct. 12, Brent Seales and partners will announce a major BREAKTHROUGH in the two-decade journey to uncover ancient wisdom and read the Herculaneum scrolls via livestream here: engr.uky.edu/live.
What an incredible and underrated achievement. It shows what humankind would be capable of if we didn’t expend most of our resources on profit and war.
The application of radiological data to scan and preserve artifacts and ancient remains, along with preventing their destruction through manual manipulation, has become such a valuable practice. What has been hidden for so many centuries has given way to a new, non-invasive form of archeology and forensic anthropology. I can't wait to see what things we discover next!
I since a longer time wonder why I do not yet find material, on Google, about attempts to reconstruct past sound from the traces it has left in hardening substances.
Would be wonderful to recover a few of the various ancient historians’ lost texts. Sadly, from what I’ve heard most of the Herculaneum library scrolls seem to be second-rate religious polemics.
@@sirrathersplendid4825 Isn't that still history? Philosophical ramblings are part of, influenced by, or based on history My thought (not based on anything historical) is that, before the printing press, it was a very big deal to have written word. The fact that the are lots of examples, gathered in a few locations, adds some context. These were collectors. They wouldn't have random copies of unimportant text. These would be works, possibly commissioned, considered important enough to create, obtain, and collect in ... collections. That should say something about the owner, the time, other collected works, etc. I have old magazines. I collected them. Lots are from before I was born. They have NO value, other than I like the ads, or the subject, or, because there aren't any others any more. Magazines are ephemeral. They weren't meant to be kept, they were meant to be bought, hopefully read, and discarded with trash - a short, almost non-existent lifetime. They were created all at once, by the 10s or 100s of THOUSANDS. The scale and INsignificance boggles my mind. They are WORTHLESS To have a scroll, much less 3, 10, 100 in a collection, would require so much significant effort. I've got lots of books - too many of which I haven't even read. Several books I have multiple copies of, through accident or forgetfulness. I could but them without thinking. I didn't have to search then it much, I didn't have to pay someone to find them, I didn't have to create something over the spam of days, months, or years, and after they set up the press, they would print 10s if thousands of COPIES - each exactly the same, because the had the economy of scale. And, most of the books I have are long outdated, or fiction works in an ocean is other works. Anything committed to creation as a scroll would have either immediate value as a documentary recording or because it was priceless and needed to be preserved. All my junk is value-less, and was mass printed, and only has value because of MY interest. I wonder what would be on the bookshelves of rich people, famous people, industry leaders, world leaders, etc., today? What would THEY think is worth seeking out, collecting, and preserving?
@@ramixnudles7958 - Well, of course the scrolls are of value, especially to theologians and philosophers, also to linguists, and a whole range of other specialties, but to the general reader they’re not as exciting as one of the lost works of a famous ancient author.
What a thrilling story. We live in absolutely amazing times. Thanks for the wonderful graphics showing how the roll unravels virtually. Astounding what your group accomplished.
This is the true power of machine learning techniques and it makes me so excited for the future & what we will be able to uncover using all of the information we usually ignore or can't make use of
One could, for example, produce all sorts of noises close to hardening gypsum or plaster and let an AI analyze what patterns that produces in such materials. If you refine such an algorithm enough and scan such a material finely - or also just often - enough, this could enable you to even listen to how ancient Romans, Greeks, or Egyptians have spoken or sung.
Wow. AMAZING! Thanks to Dr. Seales and his teams!! I hope this leads to us being able to read many more ancient texts, and learning more details about history that we never thought possible.
This is groundbreaking!! I have a degree in Classics, I LOVE ancient literature, and to think that we MIGHT have new texts about to be revealed is just so exciting! I can't wait to see what we learn!
This work is fascinating, and exciting. I learned about the Herculaneum scrolls in college - decades ago - and it’s exhilarating that this extraordinary work is yielding an ability, finally, to read these documents from the Classical world.
Yah, the distance in time really impresses. I've read about Herculaneum in a book c. from the 1940s, i.e., in a source which itself did already appear to me as ancient. Now, perhaps fifteen years later, I hear about such a progress. This to me greatly illustrates the dimensions of the project, and incredibly enlivens my perception of antiquity.
As a Greek student of electrical and computer engineering this is truly fascinating, I salute everyone who is working on this, it is such an interesting topic.
It is absolutely wonderful that this is happening. One day they are going to find one of those ancient texts that we've known _about_ for centuries but never actually had a copy of and the world of classical scholarship will explode! So exciting a prospect.
Wow, I think about these scrolls every now and then because I really want to know which texts they contain. I hope they will publish the content if they are uknown texts.
X-tech here and my med center just received its first OEC 3D c-arm. Makes me giddy. Seen a marching progression of new and wow in 33 years in the field. Always more to dream about and see happen.
What a fascinating project. To even have the idea that such a venture might be possible and then to coordinate the resources, in line with the cutting edge technologies over time is indeed a Hurculaneun achievement! I can't wait to show this to my kids as an example of the kind of unimaginable problems that prove to be solvable through the vision and dedication of people like Professor Seales and his team. Many thanks for sharing this and regards from Sydney - David
So glad to be alive to see these unbelievable, seemingly miraculous new high-tech ways of viewing the past. I am a Biblical scholar and theologian who idolizes your work.
From a broad perspective it's incredible how close this is to the science fiction of being able to scan an object and retrieve all the information possible without any physcial interaction.
Very good comparison! But we could soon get even closer to such a sci-fi scenario, when the traces left by sound in quickly and reliably hardening materials like plaster or gypsum are going to be transformed into audible recordings.
Mind blown. Such innovation, ingenuity and attention to the small stuff. We must always keep pushing and it's projects like this that inspire us to do so. Greetings from Spain.❤
This sort of stuff always makes me emotional. It's easy for us as modern humans to forget that the people that came before us were largely the same as us. And having these physical examples of that is really precious.
@@oceanexploration What's funny about it for you? The cost? How far in the future you imagine it? How often you'd have to scan a sample, and how finely? Or how elaborate an algorithm it would require?
I saw the Herculaneum exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art when I was in undergrad. I look forward to hearing what the scrolls are found to say. I hope it isn't something we already have, but something interesting that has long been lost.
Great case study for practice of less invasive archeological methods... as so many discoveries were marred by archeologist impatience, not willing to wait for better technology to come around. Excited to see further applications of this tech.
To be fair, looking at previous work that way is a very strong case of hindsight being 20/20. They likely had no way of knowing what kind or quantity of progress would occur in their lifetime. And we are notoriously impatient as a species because an individual has maybe a centuery at most.
@@jnharton That's kind of my point - some works were destroyed because of short-sightedness. Archeologists should practice patience and restraint when current tech can't solve a problem... they may have to accept that they won't see the solution in their lifetimes.
but most of those were not in the computer era back in the earlier half of 1900 nobody whould ever have been able to imagine anything like this ever be possible, to them this is some black magic
@@basvanderwerff2725 Sigh. Yes, obviously. Just like tech 100 years in the future would seem impossible to us now... but the point is, you realize (without knowing specifics) that someday maybe someone can invent a new technique.
This is such an important development. I am so delighted by this and don’t have the words to express my excitement over the potential for learning more about humanity.
Well done bringing the technologies together to solve the challenge. There is so much we can do with todays tech but we need teams like this to bring it all together.
Oh yes, give me a team to make audible what ancient Romans have spoken, via an analysis of the traces left by sound in hardening materials like plaster or gypsum!
I first learned of the Vesuvius Challenge a few months ago, as an archaeologist working on Roman research (and as a person interested in classical history more generally) I am so so excited to see where this research leads, I have so much hope for whatever lost writings may be rediscovered by this work.
If you're really interested, it could also interest you that leading politicians of the time c. until before Giotto di Bondone have regularly re-emerged with a specific biometry, and embedded in accordingly comparable collectives. You can see this if you accurately enough compare, for example, Cato the Elder, Caesar, Vespasian, Marcus, Constantius Chlorus, and Theodosius I. A continuation of that series then must have unfolded among painters and later, in Goethe and Gerhart Hauptmann.
That could indeed fit! And it's unfolding notoriously close to Vesuvius. First, Vesuvius has yielded, at all, the possibility to look into an ancient-Roman city, with food still on the tables, pictures on the walls, furniture still standing around. Next, holes in the ground between the Pompeii ruins have been filled so that figures of the victims of the catastrophe have emerged. Now that catastrophe triggers another general archaeological breakthrough. I feel tempted to speculate about what could still follow, down there.
I had the pleasure of seeing the talk at Baylor University about this in 2015 or 16 - truly one of the most amazing ways to merge the ancient and modern, thanks so much for your amazing work!
Yes, the best is that prof. Seales looks like an ancient Roman himself. Perhaps he has read classic texts enough to achieve that. Reading an author makes you resemble him.
Bravo! What an incredible journey of technological discovery and application of AI for a truly noble cause. Thank you for your determination in pursuing such a worthy goal, and for willingly enlisting the involvement of many others so that it could eventually be reached.
This was a wonderful breakthrough and making the impossible possible. Thank you to all the scientists and support teams who worked on the project. You are all incredible.
HAPPENING TODAY: At 4 p.m. (EST) on Thursday, Oct. 12, Brent Seales and partners will announce a major BREAKTHROUGH in the two-decade journey to uncover ancient wisdom and read the Herculaneum scrolls via livestream here: engr.uky.edu/live.
This is just astonishing. Those scrolls look so destroyed, and yet somehow they are not when the right minds with the right technology are applied. Wow!
Bravo! There are works about history, science, medicine, religion, and natural history from the first century that are referenced by other writers, for which there are no extant copies. It is probable that many of these works are in the Herculaneum scrolls.
I believe the Herculaneum library mainly contained fairly second-rate diatribes on religion and philosophy. But we all live in hope that some long-lost historical or scientific works will surface 🤓.
@@sirrathersplendid4825 A library which, after an investment of millions of dollars, just yields diatribes could at least illustrate how ridiculous it is to create libraries with too little attention to their contents.
@@HansDunkelberg1 - I have a library probably bigger than the one in Herculaneum. If my library were the only one to survive into the 5th Millennium, I suspect future researchers will be extremely disappointed. My books were collected for my professional and specialist personal needs not as a repository for posterity. The same is true of most personal libraries.
@@sirrathersplendid4825 Indeed, personal books will mostly rather bee too general or too specialized for such an investigator who arrives after two thousand years. I, for example, have many classics from the 20th century and a certain focus on history. The classics will probably survive anyway, and some of the more specialized works may to a future archaeologist already appear as providing few novelties of significance. I've recently even discovered a long diatribe (against Goethe) in the middle of one of my books, the subject of which has been modern physics! But an archaeologist stumbling over my books would certainly be utterly lucky. That history focus isn't very narrow. I do own some works of a mid-level specialization, like one on the Soviet Union's entire history, many about all of world history, big books about myself in my past lives, a history of the France of the last century, or a four-thousand-page edition of a leading English dictionary. I'm also a major author myself (a reincarnation of Cato the Elder, Caesar, Marcus, Goethe, and Gerhart Hauptmann), so that it will interest a historian what I have bought (and sometimes even read).
I think you exaggerate. Herculaneum has been a _nuisance_ by the impossibility to decipher the scrolls, for a long time. The current progress now appears as grandiose because that nuisance is finally overcome. Like the key to a part of a uniquely big library rather appear to me regularities of a certain reincarnation-like phenomenon one can measure.
Hi Hans. Let's just say I'm scientifically optimistic. The "largest library" I refer to is the Vatican library. Whether it's the "reincarnation of knowledge" or "knowledge brought back from the dead" doesn't matter, there must be a coherence and correspondence between some of the earliest Vatican manuscripts, and these Herculaneum ones. I believe it's "time to open the books". Cheers, P.R.@@HansDunkelberg1
@@philliprobinson7724 I so far see only the prospect of a correspondence consisting in the situation that both libraries have contained manuscripts in the same languages.
@@HansDunkelberg1 Hi Hans. That's a testable hypothesis now, thanks to science. Frankly, I doubt you're correct. Writings from "an era" will contain the issues from that era, because scrolls were rare and hand-copied. Topics must correlate to a greater or lesser extent. Today we only know what the ancient Greeks wrote because the Islamic scholars copied their works, which the west translated during the renaissance. Different languages, same topics. Cheers, P.R.
HAPPENING TODAY: At 4 p.m. (EST) on Thursday, Oct. 12, Brent Seales and partners will announce a major BREAKTHROUGH in the two-decade journey to uncover ancient wisdom and read the Herculaneum scrolls via livestream here: engr.uky.edu/live.
It seems that we may be looking at an accelerating process. One break-through leads to 2, leads to 4, and so. Every improvement leads to a better idea for the next step, which itself then lets you go back to earlier one in an iterative fashion. The ideal case would be an automated mechanism that can be crowd-clustered, just like the old SETI@Home or cancer research protein folding distributed systems where people can donate computer time.
@@michaelhoffmann2891I would absolutely donate my computers resources to a project like this.
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The material sciences field is sometimes mind boggling...being able to read such ancient texts without even unrolling them is simply stunning as an achievement.
excuse me?? what exactly were they able to read? did you catch that part? even a single word? it seems they forgot to post a link.
@@LightninSharples They said they identified it to be a section from the book of leviticus. So it's a bible/torah scroll. They got experts on hebrew for that clearly.
@@LightninSharplesyou're not very bright, are you bud
thanks@@Despotic_Waffle
The CT scan already does much more precise discrimination in medicine. I'm honestly surprised that it took machine learning to do this, but I guess radiologists use contrast dye for a reason.
My late uncle, Allen Ross Scaife, was the classics professor who helped initiate this idea and set this whole process in motion. He died in 2008. He would be so proud to see how his work has continued beyond his life. Congratulations to professor Searles and his colleagues.
You must have a surplus "r" in the name of the professor talking in the video.
Finally! I’m local and saw the newspaper story 20 years ago about Dr. Seales idea and project. Periodically, I’ve wondered if they’d had any success. What a thrill it must have been to finally see that ink appear on a video screen! Brilliant and well done!
What if it turns out to be a bunch of multi level marketing publications. Get in on the ground floor and sell this revolutionary new olive oil based beauty creame.
It truly is astounding, the power of the human mind to combine technologies and solve problems in a way that seems impossible. It’s way beyond impressive.
@@thomasprislacjr.4063 Is it too late to get in on that?
i didn't quite get it.. can they read them yet?
@@thomasprislacjr.4063That'd be hilarious, but it would also be valuable in its own right. It would teach us stuff about the culture and economics of ancient Rome that we didn't know! Also, I bet you an MLM pamphlet would have more "casual" or "vulgar" Latin on it than the literature that we have. The way that people actually spoke is a gap in our knowledge that's been filled a bit through Pompeiian graffiti, but it'd be super interesting to have a longer-form text meant for the average person to read. How would the vocabulary, spelling, declensions and conjugations change - if at all??
This just gives me chills. As a middle-aged Graeco-Roman History nerd, I just hope I live long enough to see some revelations. The list of works that are lost and/or that we only know by reference is endless. Histories of the great authors from Livy to Procopius [EDIT: as someone pointed out, this would require a time machine: Procopius was, of course, several centuries later. I meant Polybius, the Graeco-Roman historian of the Republic era], maybe someone even managed to obtain a copy of Claudius' works on the Etruscans and his dictionary of the language. That alone would be a breakthrough that can hardly be described. That's before even the possibility of totally unknown works we've not even had the slightest idea existed. That includes plays and works of fiction. The Petronius family was said to have their home in this area - what if we could get more of the (in)famous Satyricon?
....Yes, like an initiation into Quantum Physics, brrrrr!? Just had my mind jolted here, wish I was part of this team, just a bit too elderly and remote though....
@lorenzolarue337 Italian?
Yes! More of that, less Leviticus please.
@@scowell "What you want" vs "What you need".
@@jb04evanivich That was a good magazine. You might be able to find back issues online.
I had Dr Seales as a professor in a few courses like computer graphics and Java in 1996. He was the best teacher in the department!
As a computer engineer I'll admit this is an incredible achievement.
As a grocery store bagger, I'll admit this is an incredible achievement.
As a Trump supporter, I'll admit nothing, but a wall would have prevented the lava from illegally entering Herculaneum.
@@durandalgmx7633and Carthage would have paid for it, bigly
I must say, as a penguin caretaker, I am relieved to hear that.
hahahahahahhhahahaha roflmfao@@durandalgmx7633
As a Historian myself, this is mindblowing! Espectacular job on bringing to life new historical sources!
Yes, but it's Leviticus. Too bad the text was something I can find in a motel 6 drawer.
@@riparianlife97701 That's not what's on the Herculaneum scrolls. That was on the En-Geti scrolls.
@@riparianlife97701 could have been worse? Could have been puns.
@@Samson_Ight
Espectacular isn't a word in English. I think you meant Spectacular job. ;-)
Wow. I am getting chills! As a 10-year-old, I was in Herculaneum in the early days of the exploration, and it always held magic for me. (schoolteacher parents on leave) My mom took me to the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the DeYoung in San Francisco with great excitement, etc. have had an interest 60 years. Yay!
Cool 😎😎😎😎
Lucky you!
How have you achieved such longevity?
That last “Yay” was your 10-year old self speaking, I think. 😆
Lol I thought you meant that you were 10 years old today.
It's about 2am, I'm stopped for a rest on a long drive in Australia and this popped up in my youtube feed. Absolutely gobsmacked. I can't wait to read more about your achievements. Congratulations on the work, and thanks for such a compelling short intro.
You should rather relax your eyes a bit after a long drive than watch CZcams, but ... I've done the same 😊
@@neatwheat ha ha, yep.. sound advice :)
But ... when the content is THIS GOOD!!
@@neatwheat At that time, one might benefit from eating more Vitamin A. Like get a can of pumpkin, water it down by 1 can, and make soup out of it with some fat calories for Vit. A absorption.
Though, drinking Dandelion Leaf Tea does about the same, being high in Vitamin A. Just mind that it's high in Vitamin K, if you happen to be on Coumadin/Warfarin.
Don't run over a rue.
@@brucemiller8109 haha. Very real possibility. I didn’t though :)
(And it’s a roo.)
Years ago I read about the discovery of the scrolls. And how the scientists was storing them until the tech reached a level, so they could read them. I never thought it would happen in my lifetime. Amazing!
It adds new meaning to the Daniel 12
"4But you, Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book, until the time of the end. Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.” "
But imagine a book that is actually sealed and cannot be opened until a later time.
There could be several 100 scrolls or more left in Pompei and Herculaneum. And now the tech is ready so we can read them. It could be texts from Archimedes. Or Historical data that could solve historical mysteries.
@OnTheThirdDay so you're saying one of the authors is named Daniel? Probably going to happen since there are 600 of them.
But I don't think anything in any Bible is literal. Pretty sure it's talking about a non-literal book and a non-literal seal.
@@Kyle-nm1kh It was kinda a joke.
The story in that part of the biok of Daniel is about a person named Daniel who sees visions and in the vision, toward the end, an angel tells him to write down what he saw and seal it up because the prophecy is not for his time but a later time.
Take it or leave it. Make what you will of it.
Now, given that context about an entirely different thing, the scrolls in this video are sealed by the ash and will LITERALLY not be able to be read until the time is ready (or more precisely, the technology is ready).
This is what the OP was talking about and I thought I would make a joke.
@@OnTheThirdDay sorry I couldn't tell you were making a joke. I know there are a lot of Bible thumpers out there who literally think everything that happens is prophecy. Like Noah's ark was a literal ship, the garden of Eden was a literal garden, God created everything in literally 7 days (even though days are based around rotation of the planet). Like it's obviously not literal give me a break. Noah's ark was a database, the garden of eden was a library, God creates everything in 7 steps not days. The end of times is quite possibly, and likely (if you ask me), another non-literal concept.
This is the coolest ever and there are many more scrolls to be found at Herculaneum. Some really prominent people with private libraries lived there.
Wow, thank you YT, this was one of the best suggestions ever!
Incredible, simply incredible. I would have loved just a little about what was actually written in the Herculaneum scrolls---more philosophy? Poetry? Or something as mundane as government records or an accounting of the wheat harvest?
Given the content of much of the art there, pornography is a reasonable guess.
Didn't he say it was Leviticus from the bible?
@@jeannettefrye5086 I missed it if he did. I'll have to watch it again.
@@brettclark8020 There are/were societies that did not recognize human sexuality as "pornography;" that's largely a more modern thing---modern being a relative term!
@@jeannettefrye5086 Oh I believe he did---I was so distracted by how cool this is that I forgot he'd said that!
I needed to see something today that would give me hope for humanity, thank you.
I used to work for a place that scanned in old documents, film, microfiche, microfilm, books, magazines, blueprints - name it, we scanned it. There were a lot of things that would crumble to dust if you tried to handle it. This technology is greatly needed! There are untold numbers of valuable records rotting away that need to be saved. We'd go into a local government buildings and find large boxes with half the things in them destroyed from sitting in some musty old basement.
I love clever and pioneering folk. We'd be lost without their existence.
Another example of how human ingenuity knows no bounds. This is a remarkable development, and promises to considerably enrich our understanding of Greco-Roman civilization.
Thank you for you and your teams' efforts! Unlocking our Graeco-Roman heritage from the Herculaneum library would be perhaps akin to resurrecting a portion of the Library of Alexandria. So, so important.
Good comparison!
This is incredible. I lack the words to express myself further. Bravo!
What would you say if someone came up with an algorithm that can exactly reconstruct sound from the traces it has left in hardening materials while they were hardening?
A a Computer Tech student/Technology nerd, and MASSIVE "The Elder Scrolls" video game fan.... THIS... THIS story peaks every interest there is!!
Amazing developments that were science fiction only 40 years ago! This is an exciting R&D project; I will be eagerly watching for updates. Congratulations on your historical success!
You certainly meant a _historic_ success, didn't you?
They are not mutually exclusive conditions so you may read it that way if you like. The adjective I used was more apt in that it isn't unnecessarily hyperbolic. @@HansDunkelberg1
This opens a lot of doors for archeologists and classical scholars, the knowledge lost at the burning of the library of Alexandria and other disasters may be possible to recover in part through other discovered texts that are put this process. Keep up the good work.
A brilliant demonstration of what machine learning can achieve when applied to once unsolvable problems.
Amazing that these can be read without destroying them.
This is absolutely fascinating. I can't wait to see what future discoveries bring us. I graduated college in 1986, and the world is a whole lot different from back then. It is definitely changing at an accelerating pace.
The crazy thing is we already have an insane amount of ancient material we just lack the number of educated specialists to work on it so we have restoration and translations at a feasible pace. The scanning and AI symbol enhancement and ability to connect pieces of fragments will likely advance now pretty fast. We are likely gonna see because of this some of the most in volume and in substance biggest breakthroughs in the next decade. There is a massive cache of fragments I believe from Israel from an ancient dump site that has given us some of our biggest evidences for substantiating the bible and the problem is it takes some highly specialized papyrus translators/restoration specialists, and we've basically had all of them in the world working on these fragments for something like 50-100 years another documentary said working full time and they've only finished about something like 2% of the material. If refined in the next few years and applied to even that cache of fragments we'll have the most insane biggest break thorough of the modern era for this stuff.
Yeah, some areas of technology seem to be advancing at an accelerating pace in recent years. The stuff that is possible nowadays is incredible even from the perspective of just the year 2000. Just these mere 23 years ago, we didn't have decent digital cameras, no single full genome had been sequenced, CRISPR wasn't invented and gene editing was a purely theoretical concept, machine translation was still a pipe dream, streaming decent quality digital video was pretty much impossible, the prevalent lighting technology was still incandescent bulbs, AI was something only discussed in sci-fi, mobile phones were actually only phones, nothing else, and so on. We don't really acknowledge these things while they're happening around us, but once you take a step back, you realize how much has changed. The world we're living in now is so different from the world just a quarter of a century ago that a time traveler would run into serious adjustment problems. Going even further back, the world of today would be basically unrecognizable for someone from the year 1975. Really makes you wonder what things will be possible within our lifetime. Synthetically grown organs and limbs for transplantation? The alcubierre drive? Mind/machine interfaces? Atomic 3D printing? Nuclear fusion reactors? All of this doesn't seem as unrealistic within the next 30, 40, 50 years once you take that step back and put it into perspective, especially once you factor in how powerful and useful NLM AIs have become in the last two years and how much they could further accelerate advances.
And not for the better.
@Vingul Human progression is always better even if it doesn't seem like it
@@vyros.3234 "don't believe your lying eyes", eh? You're conflating change with progression. Two different things. Progress is not inevitable.
This is absolutely epic! I can't wait for texts to start coming out and being translated! I also ponder what the authors of those texts would think of the idea of a civilization 2000 years after their time using what they would see as straight-up magic (in the Clarke sense) to recover their words.
Quite possibly they might just wonder why we hadn't managed to make copies and take care of them.
@@jnhartonThat’s actually pretty plausible now that I think about it. They might just be pissed lol. But I doubt it, like today we can’t even fathom people still being around in 2k years let alone what they will be like, or if they will care to look us up in the archaeological record.
@@jnharton - That sounds like the framework of a Monty Python skit. Author of said scrolls played by John Cleese, "Sorry, rolled up? For 2,000 years. Right." *breathes deeply and looks at peers "...so glad you lot ENJOYED them!! To think I'd spent 22-hours a day for 20 years writing - worried about criticism - never giving thought to them staying rolled up for 2,000 years...SiLLy mE!!! I say LET the volcano erupt!...THAT'll teach you not to read my scrolls."
In all seriousness though, it might have been copied numerous times - and this one surviving scrolls may just be one of those copies and not the original itself.
HAPPENING TODAY: At 4 p.m. (EST) on Thursday, Oct. 12, Brent Seales and partners will announce a major BREAKTHROUGH in the two-decade journey to uncover ancient wisdom and read the Herculaneum scrolls via livestream here: engr.uky.edu/live.
What an incredible and underrated achievement. It shows what humankind would be capable of if we didn’t expend most of our resources on profit and war.
The application of radiological data to scan and preserve artifacts and ancient remains, along with preventing their destruction through manual manipulation, has become such a valuable practice. What has been hidden for so many centuries has given way to a new, non-invasive form of archeology and forensic anthropology. I can't wait to see what things we discover next!
I since a longer time wonder why I do not yet find material, on Google, about attempts to reconstruct past sound from the traces it has left in hardening substances.
Now I want to know what is written in these scrolls.
Incredible. I can't wait for the texts to be published!
Would be wonderful to recover a few of the various ancient historians’ lost texts. Sadly, from what I’ve heard most of the Herculaneum library scrolls seem to be second-rate religious polemics.
@@sirrathersplendid4825 That's history, right?
@@ramixnudles7958- Not really history; they’re philosophical-religious ramblings about the nature of the gods and such like.
@@sirrathersplendid4825 Isn't that still history? Philosophical ramblings are part of, influenced by, or based on history
My thought (not based on anything historical) is that, before the printing press, it was a very big deal to have written word.
The fact that the are lots of examples, gathered in a few locations, adds some context.
These were collectors.
They wouldn't have random copies of unimportant text. These would be works, possibly commissioned, considered important enough to create, obtain, and collect in ... collections.
That should say something about the owner, the time, other collected works, etc.
I have old magazines. I collected them. Lots are from before I was born.
They have NO value, other than I like the ads, or the subject, or, because there aren't any others any more.
Magazines are ephemeral. They weren't meant to be kept, they were meant to be bought, hopefully read, and discarded with trash - a short, almost non-existent lifetime.
They were created all at once, by the 10s or 100s of THOUSANDS. The scale and INsignificance boggles my mind. They are WORTHLESS
To have a scroll, much less 3, 10, 100 in a collection, would require so much significant effort.
I've got lots of books - too many of which I haven't even read. Several books I have multiple copies of, through accident or forgetfulness. I could but them without thinking. I didn't have to search then it much, I didn't have to pay someone to find them, I didn't have to create something over the spam of days, months, or years, and after they set up the press, they would print 10s if thousands of COPIES - each exactly the same, because the had the economy of scale.
And, most of the books I have are long outdated, or fiction works in an ocean is other works. Anything committed to creation as a scroll would have either immediate value as a documentary recording or because it was priceless and needed to be preserved.
All my junk is value-less, and was mass printed, and only has value because of MY interest.
I wonder what would be on the bookshelves of rich people, famous people, industry leaders, world leaders, etc., today? What would THEY think is worth seeking out, collecting, and preserving?
@@ramixnudles7958 - Well, of course the scrolls are of value, especially to theologians and philosophers, also to linguists, and a whole range of other specialties, but to the general reader they’re not as exciting as one of the lost works of a famous ancient author.
What a thrilling story. We live in absolutely amazing times. Thanks for the wonderful graphics showing how the roll unravels virtually. Astounding what your group accomplished.
This is the true power of machine learning techniques and it makes me so excited for the future & what we will be able to uncover using all of the information we usually ignore or can't make use of
One could, for example, produce all sorts of noises close to hardening gypsum or plaster and let an AI analyze what patterns that produces in such materials. If you refine such an algorithm enough and scan such a material finely - or also just often - enough, this could enable you to even listen to how ancient Romans, Greeks, or Egyptians have spoken or sung.
Unlimited amounts of hearts to all of you for making this impossible feat possible ❤
Wow. AMAZING! Thanks to Dr. Seales and his teams!! I hope this leads to us being able to read many more ancient texts, and learning more details about history that we never thought possible.
My hat off to all that have worked on this. Amazing work.
This is great, but the most important thing said here is that cooperation is the key to faster breakthroughs.
This is groundbreaking!! I have a degree in Classics, I LOVE ancient literature, and to think that we MIGHT have new texts about to be revealed is just so exciting! I can't wait to see what we learn!
Fascinating: and from the country of UK, very glad to hear that science still thrives in Kentucky. We tend to get only the depressing news…
Lol... UK University of Kentucky.
This work is fascinating, and exciting. I learned about the Herculaneum scrolls in college - decades ago - and it’s exhilarating that this extraordinary work is yielding an ability, finally, to read these documents from the Classical world.
Yah, the distance in time really impresses. I've read about Herculaneum in a book c. from the 1940s, i.e., in a source which itself did already appear to me as ancient. Now, perhaps fifteen years later, I hear about such a progress. This to me greatly illustrates the dimensions of the project, and incredibly enlivens my perception of antiquity.
This is great, my husband is a data analyst and he was watching this with me and he is looking into the technology to see if he can learn it. Wow!
As a Greek student of electrical and computer engineering this is truly fascinating, I salute everyone who is working on this, it is such an interesting topic.
im not trying to be rune but what does "As a Greek student of electrical and computer engineering" have to do with it?
I've been waiting for this moment for.. 40+ years. I'll be patient.
It is absolutely wonderful that this is happening. One day they are going to find one of those ancient texts that we've known _about_ for centuries but never actually had a copy of and the world of classical scholarship will explode! So exciting a prospect.
I hope it will be something I have written in my life as Julius Caesar. In the villa of Piso that's likely.
Wow, I think about these scrolls every now and then because I really want to know which texts they contain. I hope they will publish the content if they are uknown texts.
For what reason(s) should such texts _not_ be published?
This is a spectacular achievement.
MRI tech and machine learning will continue to revolutionize this field for decades. Bravo!!!
X-tech here and my med center just received its first OEC 3D c-arm. Makes me giddy. Seen a marching progression of new and wow in 33 years in the field. Always more to dream about and see happen.
As a person that loves to scroll ... this is an incredible achievement.
What a fascinating project. To even have the idea that such a venture might be possible and then to coordinate the resources, in line with the cutting edge technologies over time is indeed a Hurculaneun achievement! I can't wait to show this to my kids as an example of the kind of unimaginable problems that prove to be solvable through the vision and dedication of people like Professor Seales and his team. Many thanks for sharing this and regards from Sydney - David
Absolutely astounding!!
Outstanding result! Three cheers for technology and the scientific method. Long may the enlightenment thrive!
So glad to be alive to see these unbelievable, seemingly miraculous new high-tech ways of viewing the past. I am a Biblical scholar and theologian who idolizes your work.
Just wait until the algorithms will begin to make the plaster or the gypsum talk! Such materials, while they harden, preserve traces of sound waves.
From a broad perspective it's incredible how close this is to the science fiction of being able to scan an object and retrieve all the information possible without any physcial interaction.
Very good comparison! But we could soon get even closer to such a sci-fi scenario, when the traces left by sound in quickly and reliably hardening materials like plaster or gypsum are going to be transformed into audible recordings.
Fantastic thank you to the whole team.
Game changer and amazing! 🔥🔥🔥
Mind blown. Such innovation, ingenuity and attention to the small stuff. We must always keep pushing and it's projects like this that inspire us to do so. Greetings from Spain.❤
I've been waiting for this breakthrough for years. This is very exciting.
For how many years? 1,944?
This sort of stuff always makes me emotional. It's easy for us as modern humans to forget that the people that came before us were largely the same as us. And having these physical examples of that is really precious.
Well put!
Awesome team work!
As an engineering geophysicist and advanced remote sensing and spatial analyst dude, I love this! Also having been to Herculaneum, completely Epic!
As a proctologist I can confirm that this statement is a load of crap
Your expertise could fit for an endeavor to transform leftovers of sound waves in materials like plaster or gypsum into audible recordings.
@@HansDunkelberg1 LOL That was good!
@@mikerodix4800 Haha! I may use that one. LOL nice
@@oceanexploration What's funny about it for you? The cost? How far in the future you imagine it? How often you'd have to scan a sample, and how finely? Or how elaborate an algorithm it would require?
As a computer engineer I'll admit this is an incredible achievement.. As a computer engineer I'll admit this is an incredible achievement..
What a superb achievement! Cracking work!
I saw the Herculaneum exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art when I was in undergrad. I look forward to hearing what the scrolls are found to say. I hope it isn't something we already have, but something interesting that has long been lost.
Latin student from Chicago here. Excited for the new content drop.
Wow! Well done!
The dude holding this role had never thought about that someday in 2023 somebody unfold this without unfolding it.
Very good! He'll rather have thought about uprisings in Gaul or the like.
Great case study for practice of less invasive archeological methods... as so many discoveries were marred by archeologist impatience, not willing to wait for better technology to come around. Excited to see further applications of this tech.
To be fair, looking at previous work that way is a very strong case of hindsight being 20/20. They likely had no way of knowing what kind or quantity of progress would occur in their lifetime. And we are notoriously impatient as a species because an individual has maybe a centuery at most.
@@jnharton That's kind of my point - some works were destroyed because of short-sightedness. Archeologists should practice patience and restraint when current tech can't solve a problem... they may have to accept that they won't see the solution in their lifetimes.
but most of those were not in the computer era back in the earlier half of 1900 nobody whould ever have been able to imagine anything like this ever be possible, to them this is some black magic
@@basvanderwerff2725 Sigh. Yes, obviously. Just like tech 100 years in the future would seem impossible to us now... but the point is, you realize (without knowing specifics) that someday maybe someone can invent a new technique.
@@condemned1982 After all, X-ray did already exist in the earlier 1900s.
This is such an important development. I am so delighted by this and don’t have the words to express my excitement over the potential for learning more about humanity.
Well done bringing the technologies together to solve the challenge. There is so much we can do with todays tech but we need teams like this to bring it all together.
Oh yes, give me a team to make audible what ancient Romans have spoken, via an analysis of the traces left by sound in hardening materials like plaster or gypsum!
We cannot thank everyone involved in this project enough.
Why so solemn?
I first learned of the Vesuvius Challenge a few months ago, as an archaeologist working on Roman research (and as a person interested in classical history more generally) I am so so excited to see where this research leads, I have so much hope for whatever lost writings may be rediscovered by this work.
If you're really interested, it could also interest you that leading politicians of the time c. until before Giotto di Bondone have regularly re-emerged with a specific biometry, and embedded in accordingly comparable collectives. You can see this if you accurately enough compare, for example, Cato the Elder, Caesar, Vespasian, Marcus, Constantius Chlorus, and Theodosius I. A continuation of that series then must have unfolded among painters and later, in Goethe and Gerhart Hauptmann.
This is the greatest archeological technology breakthrough the world has seen to date.
That could indeed fit! And it's unfolding notoriously close to Vesuvius. First, Vesuvius has yielded, at all, the possibility to look into an ancient-Roman city, with food still on the tables, pictures on the walls, furniture still standing around. Next, holes in the ground between the Pompeii ruins have been filled so that figures of the victims of the catastrophe have emerged. Now that catastrophe triggers another general archaeological breakthrough. I feel tempted to speculate about what could still follow, down there.
I don't know what's more impressive? The process utilized here or the revelation that people in Kentucky can read!
So amazing and exciting to retrieve ancient knowledge, once thought lost.
Amazing. So awesome to have taken classes with Dr. Seales, and to have worked on a progenitor of this project for him back in the early 2000s.
Congrats, folks. I'm from Tennessee, but you made the Southeast proud. 👍
This is utterly mind boggling. What a fantastic achievement.
I had the pleasure of seeing the talk at Baylor University about this in 2015 or 16 - truly one of the most amazing ways to merge the ancient and modern, thanks so much for your amazing work!
Facinating. Well done everyone!
this is so crazy. words that should be lost to time at the tips of our fingers. amazing work!
Well formulated!
Amazing technology, cool guy, potential interesting historical insights into ancient Rome and an entertaining video. Wow.
Yes, the best is that prof. Seales looks like an ancient Roman himself. Perhaps he has read classic texts enough to achieve that. Reading an author makes you resemble him.
One of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. Amazing applications of so many technologies.
Bravo! What an incredible journey of technological discovery and application of AI for a truly noble cause. Thank you for your determination in pursuing such a worthy goal, and for willingly enlisting the involvement of many others so that it could eventually be reached.
Science is incredible. What an amazing technology, this is such an impressive use of machine learning.
As an ancient scroll myself I find this incredible and mindblowing. Astonishing job!
Nice work! Congrats to all involved
Congratulations, Professor Seales and team! Make sure your grad students get at least a free beer if they want one.
WOW. So happy this wound up in my feed. Thanks and congratulations!
I think the feed is pretty reliable. The algorithm it's based on is incredibly refined, I have heard it is one million lines long.
Fantastic work!
Hopefully there are "private collectors" out there, with similar artefacts that can be investigated the same way.
Where should more scrolls in such a state come from?
Incredible what we can do collectively!
What does it say then?!
There's so many problems in the world and this is what we spend our effort on. Amazing!
After all, such a project provides a fascination which is both harmless and intense. It can make a war look utterly ridiculous.
This was a wonderful breakthrough and making the impossible possible.
Thank you to all the scientists and support teams who worked on the project. You are all incredible.
An absolutely incredible achievement, well done U of Kentucky! Well done!
This is insane, I can't wait to learn what's written inside of those Scrolls!!!
HAPPENING TODAY: At 4 p.m. (EST) on Thursday, Oct. 12, Brent Seales and partners will announce a major BREAKTHROUGH in the two-decade journey to uncover ancient wisdom and read the Herculaneum scrolls via livestream here: engr.uky.edu/live.
Have you already read all the other ancient papyri of Greece and Rome?
This is just astonishing. Those scrolls look so destroyed, and yet somehow they are not when the right minds with the right technology are applied. Wow!
Bravo! There are works about history, science, medicine, religion, and natural history from the first century that are referenced by other writers, for which there are no extant copies. It is probable that many of these works are in the Herculaneum scrolls.
I believe the Herculaneum library mainly contained fairly second-rate diatribes on religion and philosophy. But we all live in hope that some long-lost historical or scientific works will surface 🤓.
Perhaps you should rather say "possible" than "probable".
@@sirrathersplendid4825 A library which, after an investment of millions of dollars, just yields diatribes could at least illustrate how ridiculous it is to create libraries with too little attention to their contents.
@@HansDunkelberg1 - I have a library probably bigger than the one in Herculaneum. If my library were the only one to survive into the 5th Millennium, I suspect future researchers will be extremely disappointed. My books were collected for my professional and specialist personal needs not as a repository for posterity. The same is true of most personal libraries.
@@sirrathersplendid4825 Indeed, personal books will mostly rather bee too general or too specialized for such an investigator who arrives after two thousand years. I, for example, have many classics from the 20th century and a certain focus on history. The classics will probably survive anyway, and some of the more specialized works may to a future archaeologist already appear as providing few novelties of significance. I've recently even discovered a long diatribe (against Goethe) in the middle of one of my books, the subject of which has been modern physics!
But an archaeologist stumbling over my books would certainly be utterly lucky. That history focus isn't very narrow. I do own some works of a mid-level specialization, like one on the Soviet Union's entire history, many about all of world history, big books about myself in my past lives, a history of the France of the last century, or a four-thousand-page edition of a leading English dictionary.
I'm also a major author myself (a reincarnation of Cato the Elder, Caesar, Marcus, Goethe, and Gerhart Hauptmann), so that it will interest a historian what I have bought (and sometimes even read).
I knew I remembered this about the Dead Sea scrolls! So cool to see the process developed!
Hi. This is like finding the key to the locked door in the world's largest library. Great effort, great result. Cheers, P.R.
I think you exaggerate. Herculaneum has been a _nuisance_ by the impossibility to decipher the scrolls, for a long time. The current progress now appears as grandiose because that nuisance is finally overcome. Like the key to a part of a uniquely big library rather appear to me regularities of a certain reincarnation-like phenomenon one can measure.
Hi Hans. Let's just say I'm scientifically optimistic. The "largest library" I refer to is the Vatican library. Whether it's the "reincarnation of knowledge" or "knowledge brought back from the dead" doesn't matter, there must be a coherence and correspondence between some of the earliest Vatican manuscripts, and these Herculaneum ones. I believe it's "time to open the books". Cheers, P.R.@@HansDunkelberg1
@@philliprobinson7724 I so far see only the prospect of a correspondence consisting in the situation that both libraries have contained manuscripts in the same languages.
@@HansDunkelberg1 Hi Hans. That's a testable hypothesis now, thanks to science. Frankly, I doubt you're correct. Writings from "an era" will contain the issues from that era, because scrolls were rare and hand-copied. Topics must correlate to a greater or lesser extent. Today we only know what the ancient Greeks wrote because the Islamic scholars copied their works, which the west translated during the renaissance. Different languages, same topics. Cheers, P.R.
@@philliprobinson7724 How many writings from the time up to A.D. 79 does the Vatican have?
That's amazing, and I look forward to when they have been able to read all 600 of the scrolls. What interesting finds they will make!