There is a PBS documentary about this very thing and how it got started. Very cool and worth the watch. Needless to say, the researcher had quite a few hurdles to overcome.
This is really exciting. If you're not aware, the scrolls at Herculaneum are an entire pagan library from the first century. They're burned, hard to recover, mostly still buried. Being able to decode them without physically digging them up and damaging them is awesome.
Who knows what we could find. So many books have been lost.
philosophty · 20h ago
Seems a bit confusing to call it a "pagan library" when it's just the personal library of a very rich ancient Roman.
The ancient Roman elite often had extensive personal libraries which they shared with their friends, almost like a very primitive book publishing industry.
TrapLord_Rhodo · 19h ago
From the Christian, anyone who wasn't part of the Christian or Jewish faiths was considered pagan. In the first century CE, Epicureans were part of the broader category of Hellenistic pagan philosophers—which included Stoics, Platonists, and others—who were polytheistic or at least non-Christian. So since Philodemus makes up most of the library here, it's pretty safe to call it a "pagan" library.
tokai · 19h ago
But there is no reason to situate it in a Christian context. We are in a global multi religious community here. I could call your comment bad, supported by it being a trite semantic argument without relevancy for the subject. But that would do nothing to further the discussion here. Calling the library non-confucianist would be even more correct as Platonists are an important foundation for Christian thought. Though a completely useless labeling just as the pegan label.
flir · 19h ago
> Calling the library non-confucianist would be even more correct as Platonists are an important foundation for Christian thought.
Epicureans aren't Platonists. We know that the library went heavy on Epicurean texts.
The word "pagan" is still used by Classicists today.
bawolff · 18h ago
There is a reason to situate it in a roman context. Rome eventually becomes christianized and it makes sense to talk about before and after that. Obviously the old still influences the new, its not a hard line, but it is a major change in roman society.
TrapLord_Rhodo · 15h ago
You are right.
it's just that the romans themselves had an identity crisis of "pagan" vs. "monothestic". So yes, you are right to call out the fact that situating it in the christian context would be follie.
But the original point still stands. Calling it pagan is still a correct classification of the works in the library.
mattmanser · 4h ago
Christianity didn't even really exist at that point, if would have been a minor cult.
So it doubly makes no sense.
It is definitely not correct, it's the equivalent of calling the ruins Italian instead of Roman.
duskwuff · 13h ago
I mean, part of what makes this library interesting is that nearly all of the classical Greek and Latin texts we have access to have been passed through the filter of generations of Christian monks copying those texts. Being able to see what these texts looked like without that filter is inherently interesting.
_bin_ · 17h ago
Wrong. This is essentially the context in which we still live today though we’ve secularized substantially over the past centuries. But Rome was on the path to Christianity at this time and later converted, so this is a very common way to understand things. Generally a work is one of a few things: Christian, Jewish, maybe Muslim depending on whom you ask, as it’s also an Abrahamic faith, or Pagan.
To be honest this feels more like you have an axe to grind with Christianity or its dominance, similar to the people pushing for “BCE/CE” over BC/AD. I don’t know why, but don’t expect the rest of the world to carry that cross for you.
griffzhowl · 14h ago
> This is essentially the context in which we still live today
Who's "we"? - It doesn't apply to everyone in the world, so you're assuming some limitations in who you're referring to.
GP makes a fair point. If you mean by "pagan" simply non-Christian and non-Jewish, then to make it relevant to call it a pagan library you would need to establish that it was curated specifically to exclude Christain or Jewish themes. You might as well call it a "non-Mithraic library", if it happens to exclude mention of Mithras, which was also an up-and-coming cult among the Romans in the first century. Then it would be incorrect or presumptious to call it "non-Mithraic", unless you'd first established that it contained no mention of Mithras. And the only reason you'd do that is if Mithras held a particular parochial relevance to you. You understand that not everyone holds up an image of Mithras as a prism through which to view everything else.
OTOH, if you mean by "pagan" just that it's Roman, but from before Rome converted to Christianity, then just say it's a first century Roman library.
_bin_ · 13h ago
America, which is the center of world power and culture. You may not like that but that doesn't make it untrue. It's also where most users of this site live.
GP does not make a fair point. We're specifically talking about classical antiquity which was a fairly bounded world. Warrior god cults, like that of Mithras, didn't have a strong role in the overall state and direction of the empire. They weren't major players and it is actually perfectly fine for terminology and understanding to focus on those.
Christianity is the prism through which the Romans later viewed things and through which the heirs of classical antiquity did. This isn't parochial, this reflects your general dislike of Christianity's dominance. But I don't actually have to make a normative argument that it should be, just the positive point that it is.
"Pagan" is a widely-accepted way to refer to Rome's old polytheistic religious traditions, which existed, but not unchallenged, around the first century.
griffzhowl · 12h ago
> America, which is the center of world power and culture.
Yeah, ok. So an explicitly parochial prespective. This isn't compelling from a disinterested, objective perspective.
> Warrior god cults, like that of Mithras, didn't have a strong role in the overall state and direction of the empire. They weren't major players and it is actually perfectly fine for terminology and understanding to focus on those.
just like Christianity in 79AD Herculaneum
_bin_ · 10h ago
That's not parochial, that's realistic. If you have an axe to grind with American dominance that's your own bias; it's a fact, not something you can argue with on objective grounds. Keep your personal anti-Americanism out of this; it's keeping you from thinking clearly.
Christianity didn't have as strong an influence there and then, but it obviously did in the course of the Roman Empire, and this was around the time it started to grow. It's obviously relevant in a way cults of Mithras or Serapis or whomever else weren't.
griffzhowl · 10h ago
Thank you, that's illuminating. So it's a first century scroll, discovered in Italy, and you insist it's only true categorization is from the perspective of a present-day American Christian, while also claiming that everyone else is ideologically blinkered...
_bin_ · 3h ago
I am saying the perspective of classical antiquity and its heir in western civilization, of which America is the current exemplar, is the correct one.
griffzhowl · 11h ago
> "Pagan" is a widely-accepted way to refer to Rome's old polytheistic religious traditions, which existed, but not unchallenged, around the first century.
Do you know for a fact that the library contained no mention of Jesus nor Judaism? If you don't know this, then why do you refer to it as pagan?
The point is: we have a Roman library from the first century AD. We don't know what it contains. To call it "pagan" tacitly assumes that (a) Christianity was not relevant to the collectors of the library, and (b) whether something is Christian or not is of primary interest whenever we discuss an artefact from the past.
We don't know whether (a) is true, and (b) is only true from a particularly dogmatic and insular perspective
Tbh, I'm struggling to understand what your point is apart from you're asserting that you view the world as centered on your own particular dogmatic tradition and you find it hard to understand why other's don't share that perspective
_bin_ · 10h ago
No, of course not. The accuracy of the original statement isn't the point. The point is to invalidate the ideologically-motivated conniption fit some people are pitching about a framing that is meet for the topic to have.
sanxiyn · 6h ago
I don't live in USA lol
kiba · 14h ago
To be honest, adding the word "pagan" just seem needlessly divisive. When I read about the past, nobody is going out of their way to point out that it's Pagan.
Arainach · 15h ago
When a scientist in India publishes a study, we don't call it a "pagan" study.
The word "pagan" adds nothing to the original post. "An entire library from the first century" conveys just as much information.
_bin_ · 15h ago
Indian studies were not part of the world of classical antiquity and you know it. Nobody is calling them pagan. And no, stripping that descriptor removes information from the statement.
ab5tract · 5h ago
Greece had multiple colonies in India and there was significant cultural diffusion in BCE times.
_bin_ · 3h ago
This isn't especially relevant. It barely covered a few scraps of northwest India. Most "Indo-Greek" civilization and culture was concentrated in Bactria and Sogdiana, not those few scraps of modern-day India, and BC Indo-Greek culture was not what we'd understand to be "Vedic Indian" so much as Persian-esque.
It also wasn't exactly part of the classical hellenistic civilization we talk about as the root of the western tradition, something of which I'm sure you're fully aware, making this a moot point.
Arainach · 13h ago
Is there evidence of a single significant Christian library from the first century?
_bin_ · 10h ago
Pagan in this case would also exclude Judaism in its many different forms, which certainly had a long written tradition by that point.
gsich · 11h ago
Before Christian Era and Christian Era.
My main gripe with it is the low entropy. In BC/AD each letter is unique. Even if you only heared 1 letter you still know what was said.
card_zero · 48m ago
Seems like we could be using BCE/AV (for Anno Vulgi). This would be cromulent with how the BC/AD pair is half English and half Latin. And then for convenience and compatibility, shorten BCE to BC.
ab5tract · 5h ago
CE stands for Common Era. The whole point of BCE/CE is to not have to refer to Christian BS when referring to the line that Caesar put into our references of time.
_bin_ · 3h ago
Firstly, most people either don't know or don't regularly consider what BC and AD mean. No more than they remember i.e. stands for "id est" or know what the Latin means. These are basically opaque wrappers where there's no particular Christian subtext in their use. Or there wasn't until a bunch of people who really just hate Christianity started trying to expurgate every trace of it from our culture.
Do you understand why the phrase "Christian BS", aside from not really being much of an argument, ensures probably nine people in ten will immediately close off to what you say and refuse to take you seriously?
ab5tract · 3h ago
Do you understand that the majority of the world is not Christian?
Why do you think one should get away with trying to rewrite the very acronym that exists to not reference a religion into being a direct reference to a religion?
_bin_ · 3h ago
So what?
The alternative acronyms are neologisms created specifically out of anti-Christian sentiment.
If y'all were operating in good faith, these would catch the same level of attention:
- Sabbatical, originating from Sabbath, a Judeo-Christian day of rest,
- The use of "karma", "zen", and "avatar" as terms and concepts, which come mostly from eastern religion,
- The use of "kosher", "mazel tov", and "golem" outside religious contexts due to their Judaic roots,
- and the use of "assassin", from a group of Shiite militants during the Crusades.
Of course, none of these catch the sort of attention that BC and AD do, because this is an example of explicitly anti-Christian thought, word, and deed. If you are particularly averse to it as opposed to other religions, that is your personal bigotry to work through, not ours to placate.
ab5tract · 3h ago
Anything that isn’t explicitly Christian is anti-Christian, now?
BC/AD already exists, there is no reason for Christian activists to try and neologize our neologism.
_bin_ · 3h ago
Attacking something over its Christian roots that is no longer generally understood to be Christian is, in fact, anti-Christian bigotry. There is no policy of attacking things with any religious roots, just ours.
card_zero · 2h ago
It's probably related to the pushiness of the religion. Like, something similar might happen with Islam, or Hinduism these days. But probably not Zoroastrianism or animism. On the other hand I think it's silly and resembles damnatio memoriae.
ab5tract · 2h ago
Common Era was first used in place of AD in the seventeenth century… by a Christian.
That’s as nested as you’ll get me to go today. Blessings!
It say AD "was conceived around the year 525 by the Christian monk Dionysius Exiguus. He did this to replace the then dominant Era of Martyrs system, because he did not wish to continue the memory of a tyrant who persecuted Christians." So AD itself was a neologism to avoid mentioning something offensive (or someone offensive, Diocletian).
philosophty · 19h ago
These people were non-Christian the same way they were non-Scientologists. They were unaware of Christianity and it had little to no impact on elite Romans by 79 AD.
"So since Philodemus makes up most of the library here, it's pretty safe to call it a "pagan" library."
You're confusing the tiny number of scrolls which have been preserved with what was likely in the complete library.
The complete library was much larger and likely contained the typical mix of philosophy, drama, poetry, and speeches copied over centuries from all over the Roman and Greek world.
JoBrad · 18h ago
So is the “pagan” moniker a way of dating the work to before the rise of Christianity with the Roman Empire?
colechristensen · 18h ago
To put it simply, "pagan" was a Christian insult towards non-Christians. It is not a reasonable description for anything unless you're in a very Christian context, and even then viewing it from a modern context "pagan" is a bit of a slur.
TrapLord_Rhodo · 15h ago
it was not an insult. They called themselves pagans. There was a civil war or two in rome with Pagans on one side, and monotheism on the other. They used the term pagan, as in the "old ways". Many people died to decide the fact of whether "Rome" was going to continue as pagan, or convert to monotheism under the Kai Row.
colechristensen · 14h ago
>They used the term pagan, as in the "old ways"
That's not what the latin origin of pagan ever meant, it meant peasant or rural usually in the negative connotation common for city folks referring to people who lived outside of cities\. Were there ever any recorded instances of Romans referring to themselves as "pagan" as a group? Maybe one.
>"Rome"
Weird usage of scare quotes, especially in the time frame you are referring to, the name of the empire or the city was never ambiguous.
pizzafeelsright · 18h ago
I wouldn't say it's an insult so much as a catch all. Romans could worship any and many gods. Rome being a hub also included foreign religions.
colechristensen · 14h ago
Romans were polytheistic and didn't really have a name for their religion, nor did they think of it collectively as one thing separate from other religions, though very occasionally a set of practices might be referred to as what translates to "the Roman religion". Separate religions is really more of a monotheism thing. "Pagan" wasn't ever a self-identifying thing until well after the Christians took over and called them that for a long time.
"Foreign religions" weren't really much of a thing either, there were lots of gods and each village and city (and family really) would have their own versions of gods. Sometimes when you'd conquer a city you'd go to the most prominent temple and steal the statue or alter or whatever and bring it back to Rome with the vibe that you were stealing the god of the place you conquered.
mkoubaa · 18h ago
Just because a slur happens to be the same word as a technical term doesn't mean it can't be used as a technical term anymore. Anyone working in the field or had awareness of it knows the appropriate connotation.
It causes me physical pain when scientists change their practice to appease pearl clutching amateurs
colechristensen · 18h ago
It's not a technical term, calling things that aren't Christian "pagan" especially from before Christianity was prominent is silly and inaccurate.
Clearly modern scholars disagree with you, and it's not a matter of pearl clutching.
It just doesn't make sense to, for example, define an ancient Roman library as "pagan" (or even "pre-Christian") as if that is its defining characteristic. Unless you happen to be a medieval Christian monk of course, and then it makes complete sense.
Aloisius · 13h ago
Uh. The first page of that seems to consist entirely of articles about Christians and their views of the ancient Greeks except for one article on neo-Paganism.
If anything, that seems to prove people's point that the term is of questionable value, except perhaps when discussing early Christians or I suppose if one is writing about Christianity.
wood_spirit · 18h ago
Christianity had a really transformative impact on the Roman world so it makes sense to classify texts as pre and post Christianity. The date - literally BC and AD - don’t work so scholars have for a very long time clarified by calling the pre-Christian “pagan”.
lazide · 4h ago
In the first century CE, Christianity was barely on anyone’s radar. It’s indeed very odd to frame it this way?
permo-w · 2h ago
it isn't. besides this library and a few a few texts that survived via the East, almost every Roman text that has survived to today has survived through being copied by Christians, and stored in a Christian library. the word pagan perhaps has negative connotations, but it's a very relevant distinction
detourdog · 18h ago
Would monotheistic be a more appropriate description of non-pagers?
I don’t know anything about paganism but it seems like if the grouping excludes Jews and Christians non-Christian describes Jews and pagans.
wizzwizz4 · 18h ago
Abrahamic (= worshipping the God of Abraham) is the word I've most often seen used.
detourdog · 15h ago
That works for me but I'm still curious what a pagan is.
wizzwizz4 · 14h ago
Anyone who disobeys Abrahamic "ten" commandments 0, 1 and/or 2 (depending how you count them) – that is, anyone who does not worship the Abrahamic God as the first and foremost deity.
I'm not sure whether atheists count as pagans. (Buddhists probably are…? But really, the term was designed for the religious practices of southern and (north-)western Europe that the early-ish Christian church wanted to wipe out.)
detourdog · 12h ago
Thank you. This is a nice concise answer. The best part is geo-location of the term.
TrapLord_Rhodo · 15h ago
yes, it would. Monotheistic would be a much better term as that's how the people at the time viewed the divide.
bawolff · 19h ago
In context its clear what is meant and that terminology has a long history.
Sure you could argue the terminology is very christian-centric, perhaps even offensive to pre-christian romans, but quite frankly that's a very uninteresting debate compared to the topic at hand.
andrepd · 12h ago
In the sense that the later Christian Romans were very very eager to lean on the good ol' book burning.
One of the reasons only a fraction of a percent of the classical texts reached our days is the fact that Christians suppressed those texts, directly (by destroying them) and indirectly (by closing the libraries and temples and institutions of learning which preserved those texts).
renewiltord · 18h ago
I actually find this strange tendency of online commenters to link something to their own obscure interest very amusing. It's been a classic for as long as I recall but I encountered another today which I thought was very entertaining where a commenter remarked that he only just realized that "Suno" is the Hindi word for what we'd say in Latin as "Audi". In Latin! Hahaha!
I have decided that I, too, shall use obscure things as benchmarks and references. It's pretty good fun. In this post-Ragnarok-Online world one can imagine we need more such milestones to judge other things by.
DoctorOetker · 19h ago
> Being able to decode them without physically digging them up and damaging them is awesome.
Can you provide some citations on the technology being used in situ without digging up? As far as I understood this is the application of technology widely popularized by the Herculaneum Challenge, where scrolls are still physically dug up, and x-rayed (which will slowly still damage the scrolls) but without physically breaking them open as was repeatedly attempted in the past.
I don't care much about the slow damage from x-rays: as long as the content is succesfully extracted, one can imagine little other use for the scrolls as is.
I mostly hope some lost works on mathematics will be recovered..
mattlondon · 17h ago
They have been dug up already. IIRC they have undergone extensive scanning over the years - X-Ray, CT etc - while not being unrolled.
So they have the scans of the rolled up scrolls, this is "just" (ha!) using the scan data with lots of algorithms and compute (AI? I presume so) to virtually unroll the scrolls and read the ink off the page.
bornfreddy · 17h ago
Actually, they are CT scanning them as the project continues. IIRC they reported about scanning a new (big) batch of them about a month ago.
You are right about not unrolling them though. Many scrolls were destroyed in previous attempts to unroll them physically, so it is fascinating to see how the technology has progressed to allow reading without unrolling.
qingcharles · 17h ago
And still plenty more to be dug up, allegedly.
martinpw · 18h ago
At the start of the article it links to a previous article on the scroll from February 2025 which has some more background details:
Researchers are further refining the image using a new segmentation approach in the hopes that it will improve the coherence and clarity of the lines of text currently visible, and perhaps reach the end of the papyrus, the innermost part of the carbonised scroll, where the colophon with the title of the work may be preserved.
So the new article is indicating they were able now to decipher the title, and also indicates maybe why the title was not the first thing deciphered (presumably it is hardest to read the innermost parts.)
I'm curious why the title is in the inside of the scroll. That implies you have to completely open it to read the title - is that the way scrolls are usually written?
wizzwizz4 · 18h ago
If you're rolling the scroll up as you read (or, I guess, write) it, you'll leave it rolled up like that. I presume you're expected to rewind the tape before you return it, if you borrowed it from somebody else.
qoez · 20h ago
This is awesome but I get so worried that we're just hallucinating meaning in those little splotches.
NitpickLawyer · 20h ago
> Both images were independently reviewed by the Vesuvius Challenge papyrological team, led by Federica Nicolardi. The simultaneous reproduction of the title image from multiple sources, along with independent scholarly review, provides a high degree of confidence in the reading.
You have 2 teams using the same data, getting to the same conclusion. You also have an author that's known from other sources, with writings that we already "have". Then you have a team of experts reviewing this. Chances are these are real findings and not "hallucinations". Not everything in ML is gen-ai...
LegionMammal978 · 20h ago
To add to this, the main ML parts, as I understand it, are for the initial unrolling of layers, and for the detection of ink vs. no-ink (the position of the 'splotches'). Both of these are trained and calibrated from human observations.
All interpretation of ink as Greek letters is done purely by human inference. This may lead to errors, especially in parts where the ink is preserved especially poorly or where the text is totally different from expectations, but it would be classic human error instead of AI hallucination.
No comments yet
thaumasiotes · 7h ago
> You have 2 teams using the same data, getting to the same conclusion.
> You also have an author that's known from other sources, with writings that we already "have".
> Then you have a team of experts reviewing this.
Only the first of those points is evidence against the result being hallucinated.
suddenlybananas · 20h ago
>You also have an author that's known from other sources, with writings that we already "have".
Well, that's exactly what you'd expect from a hallucination no? If the model is overfit enough on the relevant corpus, a title that already exists should be much more likely.
LegionMammal978 · 20h ago
The ML models are looking at tiny patches for areas of ink vs. no-ink, trained on the boundaries of more visible letters found by humans. They don't know what proper Greek letters look like, and they definitely don't know what correct Greek words would be (in particular, they have no "corpus" of words). Any possible overfitting is ordinary human overfitting.
anabab · 20h ago
If they have learned on ink areas shaped as letters, what prevents them from having a bias towards such shapes?
LegionMammal978 · 19h ago
Because they don't get to see the entire letter shapes. The page at [0] shows the basic idea: they're forced to make decisions based on each part of each stroke of the letter. If they were heavily overfitting on the strokes of the letters in the training sample, then they'd be so inaccurate outside the sample that the assembled outputs would hardly resemble letters at all, much less words.
(Also, this is heavily-damaged handwriting, not clear print, so each letter isn't even uniform in shape. A model trying to cheat at ink detection would have an uphill battle trying to guess what all the variant letter shapes might be.)
We are not. This is more forensics (using ML to learn what the clues are) than "AI".
FlyingSnake · 6h ago
> Philodemus was an Epicurean philosopher and poet from Gadara whose ethical teachings emphasise the pursuit of pleasure as central to a good life. He argued against rigid logic and formal rhetoric, believing that philosophy should serve practical human happiness rather than abstract intellectual debate.
As a layman admirer of Epicurean thought, I’m so glad that even after so many wars, destruction and tragedy over the centuries, such wonderful works have survived.
helsinki · 13h ago
Brent Seales was my second CS professor and taught me how to do OOP in C++. It’s always cool to randomly see the work he’s done every few months. He was working on this project nearly twenty years ago.
ashoeafoot · 16h ago
This really is a herculean act. bravo. my condolences to all those archeology students who will never brush ash away with the same carelessness as before today. Is it really worth digging destructively ?
popctrl · 17h ago
This is so cool
As a history nerd and jaded software developer, I've been wondering a lot lately how I can use my tech skills for archeological research. Is there any way for someone with most of a bachelors to get into this kind of thing?
worewood · 17h ago
My experience with academia is that most of this hard work is done by undergrads, and conception and management by professors; developers aren't hired to do this. So besides "going back to school", there's no way in for an outsider.
bornfreddy · 16h ago
Well, they are hiring [0]. Sounds like a great way to start. Or you can join the Vesuvius Challenge if you prefer competing.
They say they're hiring but I didn't even get an email back about my application and I've been awarded $20k through the vesuvius challenge and have 10 years experience in the exact job they're hiring for so I really don't know what they're looking for or if they're looking that hard.
blackstache · 13h ago
Sorry to hear this happened as this shouldn't have been lost. I'll make sure we get in touch with you.
webdevver · 20h ago
they say they deciphered it - ok, so what does it say!? the most important information is omitted... so annoying.
number6 · 20h ago
The Greek writing visible in the image reads:
ΦΙΛΟΔΗΜΟΥ ΠΕΡΙ ΦΥΣΕΩΣ
This translates into English as:
Of Philodemus, On Nature
seydor · 18h ago
ΠΕΡΙ ΚΑΚΙΩΝ Ά
About vices - part A
sanxiyn · 6h ago
Interestingly, as written, it is ΚΑΚΙωΝ not ΚΑΚΙΩΝ.
throwanem · 20h ago
They identified it by title as a copy of a known work. This information appears very early in the article.
renewiltord · 19h ago
It is not very common to find pre-Kanishka works. I hope that we get some insight into human lives around this time. One of the things I find fascinating about ancient times is how similar humans of then were to us. Akrotiri (similarly preserved by volcanic eruption) was millennia before even the works in this discovery and yet seemed strangely familiar and normal when visiting.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF · 20h ago
> Using ‘virtual unwrapping’, the scroll PHerc. 172 which is housed at the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford has been identified as On Vices by the Greek philosopher Philodemus
Instead of an interesting discussion about the technologies used to unravel these documents, it quickly degraded into the usual politicized issues that plague the United States, and sadly it seems, now this forum.
I tried emailing Dang, to remove my account with no response. HN administrators, if you read this can please remove my account?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw44V49Fz9U
So much for the global internet.
Who knows what we could find. So many books have been lost.
The ancient Roman elite often had extensive personal libraries which they shared with their friends, almost like a very primitive book publishing industry.
Epicureans aren't Platonists. We know that the library went heavy on Epicurean texts.
The word "pagan" is still used by Classicists today.
it's just that the romans themselves had an identity crisis of "pagan" vs. "monothestic". So yes, you are right to call out the fact that situating it in the christian context would be follie.
But the original point still stands. Calling it pagan is still a correct classification of the works in the library.
So it doubly makes no sense.
It is definitely not correct, it's the equivalent of calling the ruins Italian instead of Roman.
To be honest this feels more like you have an axe to grind with Christianity or its dominance, similar to the people pushing for “BCE/CE” over BC/AD. I don’t know why, but don’t expect the rest of the world to carry that cross for you.
Who's "we"? - It doesn't apply to everyone in the world, so you're assuming some limitations in who you're referring to.
GP makes a fair point. If you mean by "pagan" simply non-Christian and non-Jewish, then to make it relevant to call it a pagan library you would need to establish that it was curated specifically to exclude Christain or Jewish themes. You might as well call it a "non-Mithraic library", if it happens to exclude mention of Mithras, which was also an up-and-coming cult among the Romans in the first century. Then it would be incorrect or presumptious to call it "non-Mithraic", unless you'd first established that it contained no mention of Mithras. And the only reason you'd do that is if Mithras held a particular parochial relevance to you. You understand that not everyone holds up an image of Mithras as a prism through which to view everything else.
OTOH, if you mean by "pagan" just that it's Roman, but from before Rome converted to Christianity, then just say it's a first century Roman library.
GP does not make a fair point. We're specifically talking about classical antiquity which was a fairly bounded world. Warrior god cults, like that of Mithras, didn't have a strong role in the overall state and direction of the empire. They weren't major players and it is actually perfectly fine for terminology and understanding to focus on those.
Christianity is the prism through which the Romans later viewed things and through which the heirs of classical antiquity did. This isn't parochial, this reflects your general dislike of Christianity's dominance. But I don't actually have to make a normative argument that it should be, just the positive point that it is.
"Pagan" is a widely-accepted way to refer to Rome's old polytheistic religious traditions, which existed, but not unchallenged, around the first century.
Yeah, ok. So an explicitly parochial prespective. This isn't compelling from a disinterested, objective perspective.
> Warrior god cults, like that of Mithras, didn't have a strong role in the overall state and direction of the empire. They weren't major players and it is actually perfectly fine for terminology and understanding to focus on those.
just like Christianity in 79AD Herculaneum
Christianity didn't have as strong an influence there and then, but it obviously did in the course of the Roman Empire, and this was around the time it started to grow. It's obviously relevant in a way cults of Mithras or Serapis or whomever else weren't.
Do you know for a fact that the library contained no mention of Jesus nor Judaism? If you don't know this, then why do you refer to it as pagan?
The point is: we have a Roman library from the first century AD. We don't know what it contains. To call it "pagan" tacitly assumes that (a) Christianity was not relevant to the collectors of the library, and (b) whether something is Christian or not is of primary interest whenever we discuss an artefact from the past.
We don't know whether (a) is true, and (b) is only true from a particularly dogmatic and insular perspective
Tbh, I'm struggling to understand what your point is apart from you're asserting that you view the world as centered on your own particular dogmatic tradition and you find it hard to understand why other's don't share that perspective
The word "pagan" adds nothing to the original post. "An entire library from the first century" conveys just as much information.
It also wasn't exactly part of the classical hellenistic civilization we talk about as the root of the western tradition, something of which I'm sure you're fully aware, making this a moot point.
My main gripe with it is the low entropy. In BC/AD each letter is unique. Even if you only heared 1 letter you still know what was said.
Do you understand why the phrase "Christian BS", aside from not really being much of an argument, ensures probably nine people in ten will immediately close off to what you say and refuse to take you seriously?
Why do you think one should get away with trying to rewrite the very acronym that exists to not reference a religion into being a direct reference to a religion?
The alternative acronyms are neologisms created specifically out of anti-Christian sentiment.
If y'all were operating in good faith, these would catch the same level of attention:
- Sabbatical, originating from Sabbath, a Judeo-Christian day of rest,
- The use of "karma", "zen", and "avatar" as terms and concepts, which come mostly from eastern religion,
- The use of "kosher", "mazel tov", and "golem" outside religious contexts due to their Judaic roots,
- and the use of "assassin", from a group of Shiite militants during the Crusades.
Of course, none of these catch the sort of attention that BC and AD do, because this is an example of explicitly anti-Christian thought, word, and deed. If you are particularly averse to it as opposed to other religions, that is your personal bigotry to work through, not ours to placate.
BC/AD already exists, there is no reason for Christian activists to try and neologize our neologism.
That’s as nested as you’ll get me to go today. Blessings!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Era#History
It say AD "was conceived around the year 525 by the Christian monk Dionysius Exiguus. He did this to replace the then dominant Era of Martyrs system, because he did not wish to continue the memory of a tyrant who persecuted Christians." So AD itself was a neologism to avoid mentioning something offensive (or someone offensive, Diocletian).
"So since Philodemus makes up most of the library here, it's pretty safe to call it a "pagan" library."
You're confusing the tiny number of scrolls which have been preserved with what was likely in the complete library.
The complete library was much larger and likely contained the typical mix of philosophy, drama, poetry, and speeches copied over centuries from all over the Roman and Greek world.
That's not what the latin origin of pagan ever meant, it meant peasant or rural usually in the negative connotation common for city folks referring to people who lived outside of cities\. Were there ever any recorded instances of Romans referring to themselves as "pagan" as a group? Maybe one.
>"Rome"
Weird usage of scare quotes, especially in the time frame you are referring to, the name of the empire or the city was never ambiguous.
"Foreign religions" weren't really much of a thing either, there were lots of gods and each village and city (and family really) would have their own versions of gods. Sometimes when you'd conquer a city you'd go to the most prominent temple and steal the statue or alter or whatever and bring it back to Rome with the vibe that you were stealing the god of the place you conquered.
It causes me physical pain when scientists change their practice to appease pearl clutching amateurs
Clearly modern scholars disagree with you, and it's not a matter of pearl clutching.
It just doesn't make sense to, for example, define an ancient Roman library as "pagan" (or even "pre-Christian") as if that is its defining characteristic. Unless you happen to be a medieval Christian monk of course, and then it makes complete sense.
If anything, that seems to prove people's point that the term is of questionable value, except perhaps when discussing early Christians or I suppose if one is writing about Christianity.
I don’t know anything about paganism but it seems like if the grouping excludes Jews and Christians non-Christian describes Jews and pagans.
I'm not sure whether atheists count as pagans. (Buddhists probably are…? But really, the term was designed for the religious practices of southern and (north-)western Europe that the early-ish Christian church wanted to wipe out.)
Sure you could argue the terminology is very christian-centric, perhaps even offensive to pre-christian romans, but quite frankly that's a very uninteresting debate compared to the topic at hand.
One of the reasons only a fraction of a percent of the classical texts reached our days is the fact that Christians suppressed those texts, directly (by destroying them) and indirectly (by closing the libraries and temples and institutions of learning which preserved those texts).
I have decided that I, too, shall use obscure things as benchmarks and references. It's pretty good fun. In this post-Ragnarok-Online world one can imagine we need more such milestones to judge other things by.
Can you provide some citations on the technology being used in situ without digging up? As far as I understood this is the application of technology widely popularized by the Herculaneum Challenge, where scrolls are still physically dug up, and x-rayed (which will slowly still damage the scrolls) but without physically breaking them open as was repeatedly attempted in the past.
I don't care much about the slow damage from x-rays: as long as the content is succesfully extracted, one can imagine little other use for the scrolls as is.
I mostly hope some lost works on mathematics will be recovered..
So they have the scans of the rolled up scrolls, this is "just" (ha!) using the scan data with lots of algorithms and compute (AI? I presume so) to virtually unroll the scrolls and read the ink off the page.
You are right about not unrolling them though. Many scrolls were destroyed in previous attempts to unroll them physically, so it is fascinating to see how the technology has progressed to allow reading without unrolling.
https://www.finebooksmagazine.com/fine-books-news/inside-her...
In particular this part:
Researchers are further refining the image using a new segmentation approach in the hopes that it will improve the coherence and clarity of the lines of text currently visible, and perhaps reach the end of the papyrus, the innermost part of the carbonised scroll, where the colophon with the title of the work may be preserved.
So the new article is indicating they were able now to decipher the title, and also indicates maybe why the title was not the first thing deciphered (presumably it is hardest to read the innermost parts.)
I'm curious why the title is in the inside of the scroll. That implies you have to completely open it to read the title - is that the way scrolls are usually written?
You have 2 teams using the same data, getting to the same conclusion. You also have an author that's known from other sources, with writings that we already "have". Then you have a team of experts reviewing this. Chances are these are real findings and not "hallucinations". Not everything in ML is gen-ai...
All interpretation of ink as Greek letters is done purely by human inference. This may lead to errors, especially in parts where the ink is preserved especially poorly or where the text is totally different from expectations, but it would be classic human error instead of AI hallucination.
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> You also have an author that's known from other sources, with writings that we already "have".
> Then you have a team of experts reviewing this.
Only the first of those points is evidence against the result being hallucinated.
Well, that's exactly what you'd expect from a hallucination no? If the model is overfit enough on the relevant corpus, a title that already exists should be much more likely.
(Also, this is heavily-damaged handwriting, not clear print, so each letter isn't even uniform in shape. A model trying to cheat at ink detection would have an uphill battle trying to guess what all the variant letter shapes might be.)
[0] https://scrollprize.org/grandprize#how-accurate-are-these-pi...
As a layman admirer of Epicurean thought, I’m so glad that even after so many wars, destruction and tragedy over the centuries, such wonderful works have survived.
As a history nerd and jaded software developer, I've been wondering a lot lately how I can use my tech skills for archeological research. Is there any way for someone with most of a bachelors to get into this kind of thing?
[0] https://scrollprize.org/jobs
About vices - part A
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philodemus
Neat
I tried emailing Dang, to remove my account with no response. HN administrators, if you read this can please remove my account?
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