A groundbreaking announcement for the recovery of lost ancient literature was recently made. Using a non-invasive method that harnesses machine learning, an international trio of scholars retrieved 15 columns of ancient Greek text from within a carbonized papyrus from Herculaneum, a seaside Roman town eight kilometres southeast of Naples, Italy.
Buried in ash Like Pompeii, Herculaneum was buried by the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. The papyri are so brittle that many were destroyed by early attempts to access their texts. Studying them has therefore always required ingenuity. In 1754, a conservator and priest at the Vatican library devised a machine for slowly unrolling them.
The competition’s design encouraged transparency and collaboration: data published in the pursuit of smaller goals benefited all competitors. Additionally, transparency enabled the independent verification of results. Teams coalesced around shared ideas and approaches to the problem. According to McOsker, the text they retrieved mentions music twice, as well as the senses of taste and sight. He thinks it is likely a work about sensation and decision-making, in the tradition of the philosopher Epicurus . The challenge’s papyrological team is still analyzing it.