On the Herculaneum scrolls

HERCULANEUM WATCH: Eighteenth-century scholars destroyed hundreds of Herculaneum scrolls trying to prise them open, because the eruption that buried the library had carbonised the papyrus shut — and in June a crowdsourced team that started as amateur contestants read an entire one, still rolled, without touching the inside. A machine-learning competition finally cracked a puzzle that had stumped scholars for 250 years: how to read ancient scrolls without destroying them (By Lab Report · Edited by Nato Lagidze, Science Blog).

This long blog post gives an overview of the history of efforts to read the Herculaeum scrolls and the current state of the question.

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 follow the links. For speculation on what else we may find in the library, see here. Cross-file under Technology Watch.

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