Artificial intelligence 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 79 AD, it charred a book about the rulers who followed Alexander the Great. Now machine learning is deciphering the 'lost book'.
A 2,000-year-old 'lost book' about the dynasties that succeeded Alexander the Great could finally be deciphered almost two millennia after the text was partially destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD 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 roll of papyrus.
“This is probably a lost work,” said Richard Janko, Gerald F. Else University Professor of Classical Studies. Else 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 several Macedonian dynasties and generals of Alexander,” Janko states, noting that it also includes “several mentions of Alexander himself”. After Alexander the Great's death 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 of the Papyri at Herculaneum, a city destroyed along with Pompeii by the eruption of Vesuvius after the end of the first millennium. The villa, so called because of its vast rolls of papyri, contains numerous writings by the philosopher Philodemus (who lived between about 110 BC and 30 BC). These papyri were charred during the eruption of the volcano. Under unknown circumstances, the text was found and was donated to Napoleon Bonaparte in 1804. He donated it to the Institut de France in Paris, where it is now located. In 1986, an attempt to unroll the papyrus caused 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 secrets of papyrus, Seales' team used Deep Learning: they trained a computer program to detect ink on papyri by having it analyze the 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 the locations of the ink with the exact place to look for it in the micro-CT,' Seales told Live Science in an email.
During the presentation, Janko emphasized 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 fragments improves each time,” 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, professor of classical literature at Baylor University in Texas, told Live Science in an e-mail. 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 Caesoninus, a Roman governor of Macedonia. “I think Philodemus is showing Piso that the example of Homer's good kings can help him overcome, as governor of Macedonia, the decadent Hellenistic rulers who preceded him,” Fish said.
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This type of research has so far only been carried out in the medical and engineering fields. Axial micro-photographs ( micro-CT ) are used to reconstruct or search for micro-fractures; Artificial Intelligence programmes, of which Deep Learning is the most advanced field, deal with the reconstruction of the system from small fragments.
This makes us realize how many technologies are converging towards disciplines that were thought to be outside their domain; this utilization will help to develop Cultural Tourism itself because it allows for the creation of new opportunities to get to know and visit places and histories that were hitherto unknown or about which few words could be spoken.
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