Read papyri from the Herculaneum library and win.

It was the year 79 after Christ, in Rome since June there had been a new emperor Titus Flavius ​​Vespasian, considered by historians one of the best rulers of Rome, the Empire was experiencing a time of splendor, but that year the latest data and research specifically On October 24, the gates of hell opened for approximately 20,000 inhabitants of Pompeii and Herculino.

The current estimate is that approximately 5,000 died. Among the deceased was Pliny the Elder, a wise Roman soldier who was in command of the fleet in the region and who went with his ships to help the people who were trying to flee the disaster and who They were crowded on the beach of Herculaneum, but the rescue did not go well or did not go well at all, Pliny died and many of his men may have died with him.

But in Herculaneum, a luxurious Villa was also found, with a Fabulous library that is believed to have belonged to the Roman statesman Lucius Calpurnius Pisón Caesonius, father-in-law of Julius Caesar, Lucius may not be familiar to you, but Julius Caesar does, he had a luxurious Villa in Herculaneum and according to some data, 1785 scrolls were found in it. The interesting thing about these carbonized papyrus rolls is that they are whole, they look like the image.

The scroll in the image is charred but intact, the problem is trying to unroll them, the fragments that you see next to them are fragments of a scroll that was tried to be unrolled and end up being destroyed, it is a very big problem because there are many texts.

Keep in mind that, if we managed to read all these rolls, all these papyri, all these documents, we would duplicate the texts of that time, think that what has really come down to us from classical Rome and Greece are copies of copies made during the Middle Ages There are very few original texts, hundreds of works of theatre, philosophy, and science have been lost.

Imagine that it could be in that library, for example, the treatises of Archimedes, with the design of his machines or the works of Hipparchus, who was the first to propose the heliocentric theory, placing the sun in the center of the solar system and was also the first as well. In calculating that the sun was much larger than the earth, we have nothing about this wise man of Hipparchus, we do not have any text, we only have comments that other wise men made about him.

It is as if within 2000 years of Albert Einstein there were only a few comments rescued from a fossil Twitter or YouTube account, imagine how much we could discover about the mysteries of the past if we managed to read those scrolls. but as you saw in the fragments that I showed before, the attempts to have ended very badly.

But there is hope to rescue the content of these texts, and you can also win by doing so; Dr. Brent Seales from the University of Kentucky in the United States has used x-ray tomography and computer vision. A few years ago he managed to read a Dead Sea scroll that contained a text from Leviticus, now he has tried to apply the same technology to the scrolls of the Herculano library and it has also been done openly through a challenge, a challenge in which hundreds of thousands of dollars in Prize can be won, up to a million dollars in Prize.

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