https://scrollprize.org/grandprize
https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1754559155908882909
A lot of this seems pretty legible.
https://scrollprize.org/grandprize
https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1754559155908882909
A lot of this seems pretty legible.
Oh, I was wondering about this a few months back, but had forgotten about it! Thanks for linking the update.
Too bad it’s Epicurean
Interesting that it’s a Greek document. Have they identified any in Latin yet?
You know, it seems hard to find any comprehensive information about the Herculaneum Papyrii. I dug around for a while looking, here’s what I managed to find.
It seems there are around 1806 scrolls total: 341 are relatively complete, 500 are mere fragments, and the remainder are somewhere in between. Of the total, it is estimated that 62 are in Latin and the rest are Greek, but it is difficult to know with certainty because we can’t read most of them yet.
If you were asking about the Vesuvius project in particular, they are working with four scrolls: the first is known to be in Greek, and seems to be the only one with substantial data analysis done on it so far. Based on a fragment from the fourth scroll, it is in Greek, too. I wasn’t able to find information about the second and third scrolls, but most likely they’re Greek as well (since the scrolls known to be Latin are supposed to be in pretty bad shape).
Since the 2023 prize entry seems to do pretty well at reading the pages once they’re unrolled, the current bottleneck in reading the scrolls is “unrolling” them. This is the goal of the 2024 prize. If they can manage that, the bottleneck will be scanning all the scrolls.
Thanks, sdi. Fascinating stuff. I’ll look forward to new discoveries with the project.