The text of dozens of burnt Herculaneum scrolls could soon be revealed
Scans of 18 ancient papyri that were buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius look ‘very promising’, and there are plans to digitally unroll many more.
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"Scans of 18 ancient papyri that were buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius look ‘very promising’, and there are plans to digitally unroll many more."
Until now, only five of the scrolls had been imaged at high resolution, so an important first step was to gather more scans. Nicolardi selected the 18 papyri for this phase, prioritizing intact scrolls that might contain complete texts, as well as scrolls with a range of shapes — some are flattened, others compressed along their length like a spring — to test how the machine-learning algorithms cope with different patterns of distortion.
