AI is deciphering a 2,000-year-old "lost book" that describes the life of Alexander the Great's empire even after his death.
When Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, it charred a book about rulers who followed Alexander the Great. Now machine learning is deciphering the “lost book”.
A 2,000-year-old "lost book" dealing with the dynasties that succeeded Alexander the Great could finally be deciphered nearly two millennia after the text was partially destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 and, centuries later, handed over to Napoleon Bonaparte.
The reason for the discovery?
Researchers are using deep learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, to discern the faint ink on the rolled up papyrus scroll.
“This is probably a lost work,” said Richard Janko, Gerald F. Else University Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan, during a presentation at the joint annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America and the Society for Classical. Studies, held in New Orleans last month. The research has not yet been published in a specialized journal.
At the moment only small parts of the heavily damaged text can be read. "It contains the names of some Macedonian dynasts and Alexander's generals," Janko says, noting that it also includes "several mentions of Alexander himself." After the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, his empire fell apart. The text mentions the Macedonian generals Seleucus, who came to rule a large amount of territory in the Middle East, and Cassander, who ruled Greece after Alexander's death.
The lost book comes from the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum, a city destroyed along with Pompeii by the eruption of Vesuvius after the end of the first millennium. The villa, so named for its vast papyrus rolls, contains numerous writings by the philosopher Philodemus (who lived between about 110 BC and 30 BC). These papyri were charred during the volcano eruption. Under little-known circumstances, the text was found and given to Napoleon Bonaparte in 1804. He donated it to the Institut de France in Paris, where it is now. In 1986, an attempt to unroll the papyrus resulted in further damage, Janko said.
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What the text reveals
Janko studied the papyrus with the help of a team led by Brent Seales, director of the Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments at the University of Kentucky.
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To uncover the papyrus' secrets, Seales' team used deep learning: They trained a computer program to detect ink on papyrus by having it analyze ancient scrolls with computed tomography (CT) scans, which use thousands of X-rays to create 3D digital images. “They have visible writing, so we can match ink locations with exactly where to look for it on the micro-CT,” Seales told Live Science in an email.
During the presentation, Janko pointed out that the team's work is gradually making more of the text readable. “With each iteration of his [Seales'] work, the ability to read more of these snippets gets better and better,” Janko said.
However, many things about the scroll remain a mystery. The author of the text is unknown. It is not even clear why it was inside the villa. Janko noted that many of the texts in the villa were written by Philodemus and speak of philosophy, not history.
Janko speculated that the text may have been borrowed and not returned. One possibility is that Philodemus himself used it as a reference to write his work "On the Good King According to Homer," Jeffrey Fish, a classics professor at Baylor University in Texas, said in an email to Live Science. In this work, Philodemus compares the post-Alexandrian kings with those who had reigned before, putting the post-Alexandrian kings in a bad light.
Philodemus' patron was a man named Lucius Calpurnius Piso Cesoninus, a Roman governor of Macedonia. “I think Philodemus is showing Piso that the example of Homer's good kings can help him surpass the decadent Hellenistic rulers who preceded him as governor of Macedonia,” Fish said.
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This type of research has been carried out, until now, only in the medical and engineering fields. Axial photomicrographs (micro-CT) have a use which involves the reconstruction or the search for microfractures; Artificial Intelligence programs, of which Deep Learning is the most advanced field, deal with the reconstruction of the system from small fragments.
This makes us understand how many technologies are converging towards disciplines that were considered outside their domain; this use will help to develop cultural tourism itself because it allows you to create new opportunities for knowledge and visits to places and stories, until now, unknown or on which few words could be said.
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