The digital unrolling of the Herculaneum scroll (@scrollprize) is exciting news! Tomorrow I'll post a video about it and spend time reading some of the columns of restored text from *within* the scroll. Fantastic application of tech to the study of antiquity.
🚨Major announcement from the Vesuvius Challenge!
Researchers have completely virtually unwrapped and read an entire Herculaneum scroll for the first time; without ever physically opening it!
The Herculaneum scrolls are a collection of over 1,800 carbonized ancient papyrus scrolls discovered in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, Italy.
They were buried and preserved when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD
The text is a philosophical treatise on ethics, something we sorely could use a reminder of today.
One excerpt reads;
“…we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature…”
Prescient.