Europe 1 with AFP 3:24 p.m., February 6, 2024
Three researchers won a $700,000 prize on Monday for successfully deciphering, using artificial intelligence, a small portion of handwritten scrolls nearly 2,000 years old and severely damaged by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.
The Herculaneum papyri consist of some 800 scrolls, according to the competition organizers, charred during this eruption which buried Pompeii and Herculaneum. Resembling charred logs and preserved at the Institut de France in Paris and the National Library in Naples, the scrolls crumble and are easily damaged when trying to unroll them.
The competition, named "Vesuvius Challenge", was created by Brent Seales, a computer science researcher at the University of Kentucky in the United States, and Nat Friedman, founder of the Github platform, now owned by Microsoft.
Greek characters finally readable
The organizers had previously carried out scans of four scrolls and offered a total reward of one million dollars for anyone who could decipher at least 85% of four passages of 140 characters.
>> READ ALSO -
The lovers of Pompeii were in reality two men
The trio awarded the "Vesuvius Challenge" is made up of Youssef Nader, a doctoral student in Berlin, Luke Farritor, a student and SpaceX intern from Nebraska in the United States, and Julian Schilliger, a Swiss robotics student.
In particular, they used artificial intelligence to distinguish ink from papyrus and determined the nature of Greek characters by detecting repetitions. Using this technique, Luke Farritor had deciphered the first word of a passage, the Greek word for purple.
A 5% decryption of a scroll
Working together, they have now deciphered about 5% of a scroll, according to organizers. According to Nat Friedman, its author is "probably the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus", writing "about food, music, and how to enjoy the pleasures of life".
>> READ ALSO -
A fresco with a “pizza” discovered in Pompeii, just missing the mozzarella
Some historians believe that these documents once belonged to Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, father of Calpurnia, one of Julius Caesar's wives. The “papyrus villa”, where the scrolls were found in the 18th century, is still mostly buried and could contain several thousand other manuscripts.
“Some of these texts could completely rewrite history”
“Some of these texts could completely rewrite the history of key periods of the ancient world,” Robert Fowler, classical studies scholar and president of the Herculaneum Society, told Bloomberg Businessweek magazine.
The decipherment of these texts could indeed represent a major breakthrough: according to an inventory from the University of California at Irvine, only 3 to 5% of ancient Greek texts would have survived until the modern era.