Douglas Mercer
September 7 2024
Music is the food of love
In ancient Rome etched on sun dials would often be the words: it’s later than you think.
Story is that the city of Pompeii (famous for the Last Days Of Pompeii) hosted many fine public buildings and luxurious private houses with lavish decorations, furnishings and artworks. The city was the height of elegance and sophistication, a light touch was brought to the refinement of living. When it happened in the seaside villa many families were at table for a fine repast, they must have heard some rumbling in the distance but likely thought nothing of it, small tremors of the earth were frequent and had been accepted as but the small change of life. It is true that seventeen years previously a rather large earthquake had done much damage and caused alarm and great panic but the rebuilding had been successful and if human beings have any propensity it is to look forward and not dwell on the past. But unbeknownst to them that rumble was a pyroclastic flow of immense proportions which was traveling down the hillside to their back, it took but a few moments; by the time it was done the city and its inhabitants had been cast in near eternal amber and the flow of the lava went far out into the sea, densely packed some fifty feet over their heads. When it was dug up some 2,000 years later many skeletons were found with coins and jewelry on them. Thus the city became a byword for the out of the blue, for from the out of nowhere, an event showing once again that wherever the shadow lies on the dial it is always later than you think.
***
Buried in ash after Mount Vesuvius’ cataclysmic eruption in A.D. 79, hundreds of papyrus scrolls have kept their secrets hidden for centuries. But archeologists have now been able to decipher some of the ancient texts with the help of artificial intelligence. Discovered in the ruins of a villa thought to have been owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, the Herculaneum papyri are a collection of around 1,000 scrolls that were carbonized during the eruption, along with thousands of other relics. Found by a farmworker in the 18th century, they are named after the place where they were buried, Herculaneum — an ancient Roman town to the south of Pompeii that was also destroyed by the blast. Previous attempts to unlock their secrets have failed because most of the scrolls were turned into carbonized ash and broke into pieces. However, a number of them were painstakingly unrolled over several decades and found to contain philosophical texts written in Greek.
Until now, the only way we have had to read what’s inside the Herculaneum scrolls is to put together the thousands of pieces of the ones that crumbled apart. It’s like putting together a mosaic, and there’s not many people willing to do it. So it may take 500 years to decipher their content. With this technique, hopefully, it should be much easier, and quicker.
The breakthrough came after a global competition was launched to accelerate the reading of the texts. The Vesuvius Challenge offered a million in prizes to anyone who could solve the problem and find a way to read the remaining 270 closed scrolls, most of which are preserved in a library in Naples, which is around 8 miles west of Herculaneum. It was launched when software was released of thousands of 3D X-ray images of three papyrus fragments and two rolled-up scrolls, in the hope that global research groups would take up the challenge. A method to virtually unwrap an ancient scroll using X-ray tomography and computer vision has been created. But even that was not enough to read the barely visible ink on the ancient documents from Herculaneum. The chemistry of the ink from the ancient world is different than the chemistry from medieval times. It’s largely invisible to the naked eye even when caught by the X-ray. However, we know the tomography captures information about the ink.
In 2019, we did come up with a solution based on artificial intelligence that allowed us to see the ink, but it needed a lot of data, and we had a small team. So we launched the challenge to scale up our processes and accelerate the work. The best results were sent to an international team of papyrologists, who assessed each entry for legibility and worked to transcribe the texts. The winners were able to read 2,000 letters from the scroll after training machine-learning algorithms on the scans. After creating a 3D scan of the text using a CT scan, the scroll was then separated into segments. A machine learning model — an application of AI — then detected the inked regions, allowing them to decipher the text.
They had been able to read new text from the ancient world that has never been seen before, from 15 columns at the very end of the first scroll. The author — probably Epicurean philosopher Philodemus — writes here about music, food, and how to enjoy life’s pleasures. In the closing section, the author criticizes ideological adversaries — the stoics — who have nothing to say about pleasure, either in general or in particular.
That music is the food of love is not in doubt and that a park like future awaits is written in totally legible ink, but Philodemus made a mistake in not seeing the shadow moving on the dial—it is true that desire is limitless and will have its own, but first you have to withstand and endure the blast now that the fame wolf breaks his chains. So play on, it has a dying fall........
