from the can-now-read-letters-without-opening-them dept.
In the 1970s, some charred fragments of ancient scrolls were discovered inside the ark of a synagogue at En-Gedi, on the western shore of the Dead Sea. The archaeologists could not unroll them without destroying them, and it was doubtful any text would be legible. So they preserved the fragments in hope that one day better technology might come along.
That day is finally here, as computer scientists at the University of Kentucky have developed a technique to read them. Recently, we've seen news about being able to read closed books, but in the past couple years technology has revolutionized the field of classical studies by allowing "virtual unrolling" of ancient scrolls. The combination of a micro-CT scan and specialized software was developed as part of a project to allow scholars to read the scrolls from Herculaneum, an ancient town near Pompeii which was also destroyed in the volcanic eruption. The so-called "Villa of the Papyri" contains the only intact ancient library ever discovered and has so far yielded nearly 2000 ancient scrolls, mostly obscure and lost works associated with Epicurean philosophical ideas. (Excavation at Herculaneum is not currently active, but many scholars speculate there could be additional chambers in the villa, possibly with thousands of other lost ancient works.)
The most recent accomplishment with this technique is the reading of a biblical fragment from the En-Gedi synagogue. As Yosef Porath, a researcher involved in the original archaeological dig nearly a half-century ago, was preparing a final report on the charred scroll fragments, he asked Pnina Shor (the head of the Dead Sea Scrolls project at the Israel Antiquities Authority) to try making some high-resolution scans. Dr. Shor was skeptical, given the poor condition of the fragments (which looked like chunks of charcoal), but she included one fragment on a whim along with other objects she was submitting for cross-sectional scanning. She forwarded the results to W. Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky who has been working on the "virtual unrolling" software.
The results were striking. Not only did they obtain a clear and legible text, but it was also found to be the earliest extant fragment of the Hebrew Bible with an identical text to the medieval Masoretic Text used as the standard Hebrew edition today. The Masoretic text serves as the basis for most modern translations, and this recent find demonstrates a possible continuous stable text going back as much as 1700-2000 years. According to the researchers, it is also the first ancient biblical fragment recovered from the ark of a synagogue (as opposed to the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were preserved in desert caves.)
Links to published studies:
Article on Technical Methodology and Findings
Article on Recovered Hebrew Text and Historical Significance
Related Stories
A new camera can distinguish layers of ink hidden by several layers of ink and paper, and could also be used to analyze paintings:
MIT researchers and their colleagues are designing an imaging system that can read closed books. In the latest issue of Nature Communications, the researchers describe a prototype of the system, which they tested on a stack of papers, each with one letter printed on it. The system was able to correctly identify the letters on the top nine sheets. "The Metropolitan Museum in New York showed a lot of interest in this, because they want to, for example, look into some antique books that they don't even want to touch," says Barmak Heshmat, a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab and corresponding author on the new paper. He adds that the system could be used to analyze any materials organized in thin layers, such as coatings on machine parts or pharmaceuticals.
Also at TechCrunch.
Terahertz time-gated spectral imaging for content extraction through layered structures (open, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms12665) (DX)
Last fall we reported on the use of machine learning to decipher the first letters from a previously unreadable ancient scroll found in an ancient Roman villa at Herculaneum—part of the 2023 Vesuvius Challenge. Tech entrepreneur and challenge co-founder Nat Friedman has now announced via X (formerly Twitter) that they have awarded the grand prize of $700,000 for producing the first readable text. The three winning team members are Luke Farritor, Yousef Nader, and Julian Schilliger.
As previously reported, the ancient Roman resort town Pompeii wasn't the only city destroyed in the catastrophic 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Several other cities in the area, including the wealthy enclave of Herculaneum, were fried by clouds of hot gas called pyroclastic pulses and flows.
[...] Brent Searles' lab at the University of Kentucky has been working on deciphering the Herculaneum scrolls for many years. He employs a different method of "virtually unrolling" damaged scrolls, which he used in 2016 to "open" a scroll found on the western shore of the Dead Sea, revealing the first few verses from the book of Leviticus. The team's approach combined digital scanning with micro-computed tomography—a noninvasive technique often used for cancer imaging—with segmentation to digitally create pages, augmented with texturing and flattening techniques. Then they developed software (Volume Cartography) to unroll the scroll virtually.
[...] In October, Farritor, a college student and SpaceX intern, successfully read the first text hidden within one of the rolled-up scrolls using a machine-learning model. The achievement snagged him $40,000. Nader, an Egyptian bio-robotics student in Berlin, received a smaller $10,000 First Ink prize for essentially being the second person to decipher letters in a scroll. Schilliger, a Swiss robotics student at ETH Zurich, won three Segmentation Tooling prizes, which enabled 3D mapping of the papyrus.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23 2016, @10:12AM
God Loves Sodomy
No Take Backs
(Score: 4, Funny) by wonkey_monkey on Friday September 23 2016, @11:20AM
That day is finally here, as computer scientists
I think you mean "Top. Men."
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23 2016, @11:39AM
Computer scientists are bottoms. Bottom. Up. Men. Obsessed. With. Details.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Friday September 23 2016, @11:34AM
This will be an incredibly exciting era for historians, as it gives rise to the possibility of finding lost texts, which are known by references from others, but which we have no known copies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_work [wikipedia.org]
A somewhat breathless review of seven lost works is on Cracked.com
http://www.cracked.com/article/18368_7-books-we-lost-to-history-that-would-have-changed-world/ [cracked.com]
Any burnt scrolls could be holding part of any one of the missing works. A whole burnt library, such as at Herculaneum or Pompeii could be an incredible treasure-trove. It is possible we could find more works in the next decade than in the last 1000- years.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 23 2016, @01:43PM
I don't remember that title from the submissions queue, Marty. It's awesome, though - whether you thought it up yourself, or you found it somewhere. Some here will call it click bait, but I love it.
As for the story, it's almost as awesome as the title. Cool stuff.
(Score: 3, Touché) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday September 23 2016, @02:04PM
Sorry, the title is my fault. I just couldn't resist.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Friday September 23 2016, @11:53PM
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 5, Funny) by opinionated_science on Friday September 23 2016, @03:51PM
Good evening. Here is the news on Friday, the 27th of Geldof. Archaeologists near Mount Sinai have discovered what is believed to be a missing page from the Bible. The page is presently being carbon dated in Bonn. If genuine it belongs at the beginning of the Bible and is believed to read "To my darling Candy. All characters portrayed within this book are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental."
(Score: 3, Funny) by DeathMonkey on Friday September 23 2016, @05:41PM
Red Dwarf reference, if anyone's wondering...
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Friday September 23 2016, @05:58PM
I would have added that, but as dead text I think it works better as a comment ;-)
Still, we all tip our hats to Douglas Adams:
The Final Proof of the non-Existence of God was proved by a Babel Fish.
Now, it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some have chosen to see it as the final proof of the NON-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that You exist, and so therefore, by Your own arguments, You don't. QED"
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 24 2016, @06:44AM
So now we can figure out what the 5 lost commandments are if the pieces of that tablet that Moses dropped are ever found!
In the meantime, we can only guess. Could they be...?
11. Always look on the bright side of life.
12. The scientists got it right, Evolution is how I did it.
13. This page intentionally left blank.
14. It's 1. Collect underpants. 2. Give and it will be given back unto you. 3. Prophet!
15. 42.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23 2016, @07:48PM
Science... It's God's gift to religion!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NotSanguine on Saturday September 24 2016, @06:42AM
According to TFS:
That the text has remained static for such a long time, especially such a large text, is really quite amazing. Is any other text of this age and length is in current use today.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr