How AI is unlocking ancient texts — and could rewrite history

How AI is unlocking ancient texts — and could rewrite history

An awesome use for AI. Out of all the things that it can be used for. Helping us learn more from ancient history is an important one.

In October 2023, an e-mail pinged onto Federica Nicolardi’s phone with an image that would transform her research forever. It showed a fragment of a papyrus scroll that had been burnt in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in ad 79. The scorched scroll was one of hundreds discovered in the remains of a luxury Roman villa in Herculeaneum, near Pompeii in Italy, in the eighteenth century. Attempts over the centuries to peel apart the scrolls’ fragile, carbonized layers left many in pieces, and scholars have been forced to accept that the rest can never be opened.

Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples in Italy, had been enlisted in an effort to use artificial intelligence (AI) to read the unreadable. Now the latest results had arrived. The image showed a strip of papyrus packed with neat Greek lettering, glowing bright against a darker background. The writing was clearly legible, a few lines deep and stretched across nearly five columns.

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