Wednesday, March 22, 2023

The million-dollar Vesuvius Challenge

CONTEST: Vesuvius Challenge – Decipher These 2,000-Year-Old Scrolls And Win $1 Million. Can you help identify and read the texts on these ancient scrolls from Herculaneum? (DR. RUSSELL MOUL, IFLScience).
Fancy yourself a code breaker or a technological wiz? If so, you could win $700,000 if you can solve a 2,000-year-old mystery. The former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and a group of scientists are giving away prizes worth a total of $1,000,000, at the time of writing, to anyone who can successfully decipher scrolls recovered from a library in Herculaneum, which was buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE.

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For many PaleoJudaica posts on the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE and its destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and on the efforts to reconstruct and decipher the carbonized library at Herculaneum, start here and just follow those links.

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