First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student
I wrote this for a different community (filled with semiliterate sophists), but this is absolutely huge and could upend huge swathes of understanding about the last two thousand years.<p>You can avoid the longform essay below if you want. The short of it is there are several potentially common works possibly in the library that could directly prove or disprove what is found in the New Testament and the predicates of Rabbinic Judaism as established at the Council of Jamnia.<p>We could be seeing the beginning of conclusive proof that invalidates  the narratives of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam by the end of the year.<p>The Vesuvius Challenge isn&#x27;t just an interesting contest in the machine learning realm; it&#x27;s a groundbreaking endeavor that could redefine our understanding of the humanities if successful. The opportunity to digitally unroll and read the Herculaneum Papyri could offer unprecedented insights into ancient civilizations and the total feedstock of civilization today. This is not merely about filling in some historical gaps; it’s about fundamentally altering how we understand antiquity and, by extension, our own intellectual heritage.<p>The loss of the Library of Alexandria has long been considered a &quot;dark age&quot; event for intellectual progress. Now, consider the Herculaneum library—a collection of papyri from a villa once owned by Julius Caesar&#x27;s father-in-law, carbonized but preserved by the Vesuvius eruption in 79 AD. Hundreds of these scrolls are unreadable because their carbon-based ink blends in with the carbonized papyrus, and thus are invisible to conventional imaging techniques. Yet, these scrolls are quite possibly on the cusp of revelation.<p>Recent developments have introduced machine learning and high-resolution X-ray scans as methods for reading these &quot;unreadable&quot; scrolls. What texts do they contain? Treatises on science and philosophy? The lost books of Livy? The epic cycle? Governmental policies like the Twelve Tables? It’s a tantalizing question because whatever is locked in those scrolls could be an unfiltered look at the Roman Empire—an empire that fundamentally influenced the trajectory of Western culture, religion, governance, and philosophy.<p>Ponder a history of Rome that has not been retouched by myriadic emperors, by Constantine&#x27;s Christianity, or the interpretive lens of the Roman Catholic Church. Unmediated accounts of Roman society, unaltered by the layers of religious and political power that came later, could rewrite our textbooks and shift the justification of history. It’s not just about enriching our understanding of ancient civilizations; this could be a cornerstone on which to build a fresh philosophical understanding of human society.<p>If the project succeeds, there will be repercussions in the academic realm. The humanities have long struggled to justify their existence in a world that increasingly prizes STEM and lacks any novel sources for the classical world. Suddenly, there could be a concrete, urgent task at hand: to decode, interpret, and integrate an influx of new knowledge. The Vesuvius Challenge could revitalize the field, offering an unforeseen but compelling reason for its study. In essence, it provides a utilitarian justification for the humanities, one that transcends &#x27;cultural enrichment&#x27; and enters the realm of &#x27;historical redefinition.&#x27;<p>The Vesuvius Challenge could be the hinge upon which history swings, yielding intellectual treasure that could be as groundbreaking as the writings that were lost in Alexandria. For millennia, those scrolls have remained unread. Now, it&#x27;s a software problem. That&#x27;s not just a challenge; it’s an imperative.<p>The presence of specific works in the Herculaneum Papyri could dramatically impact our understanding of major historical events.<p>In particular for me, I pray that the biography of Herod the Great by Nicholas of Damascus is discovered intact. While mainstream accounts generally portray the life of Herod within the context of Roman patronage and Judaean politics, uncovering a contemporary account by a close intimate (and used as a primary source by Josephus) would offer fresh, unmediated insights into his rule and its socio-political intricacies. Chronologies of the life of Jesus could be explicitly validated or disproved.<p>The relevance here is far from academic. Consider the following naturalistic hypothesis: that the inception and rise of Christianity was entirely a dynastic struggle within the Hasmonean-Herodian line. What if the tale of Jesus is, in essence, a dramatized, mystified rendition of a 1st-century dynastic conflict, one that was subsequently co-opted and transformed into a religious narrative by an early form of conspiratorial thinking? Something like a 1st-century version of Q-anon, distorting real events to serve an alternative, concealed agenda in the aftermath of the First Jewish-Roman War.<p>Unveiling a document like Nicholas of Damascus&#x27; biography could be groundbreaking in testing such a hypothesis. If Herod&#x27;s life and rule were detailed without the religious overlays that later Christian interpretations bring into the picture, one could make more definitive assertions about the socio-political environment of the time. Furthermore, it could provide concrete evidence to either substantiate or refute theories about Christianity&#x27;s emergence as a byproduct of a Herodian-Hasmonean power struggle.<p>The fact that such a theory could be <i>tested</i> is significant in its own right. Traditionally, discussions about early Christianity rely heavily on religious texts and subsequent historical accounts, many of which are fraught with dogma and ideological interpretations. A primary source devoid of such influences would be a game-changer, offering a baseline of raw data from which more accurate and reliable hypotheses could be drawn.<p>And it&#x27;s not limited solely to Christianity. Rabbinic Judaism could have equally monumental implications as a result. The owner of the villa, likely a wealthy Roman, would be unlikely to have had any primary Hebrew texts like the Pentateuch. However, that doesn&#x27;t rule out the possibility of possessing Greek or Latin works discussing Jewish culture, beliefs, and politics. Given the villa&#x27;s historical context, it&#x27;s conceivable that there might be indirect ethnographic accounts from the period surrounding the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD but before the Council of Jamnia, traditionally dated around 90 AD, which helped canonize Hebrew scriptures.<p>Why is this important? The Council of Jamnia is often cited as a crucial moment for the development of Rabbinic Judaism. It allegedly led to the fixing of the Hebrew Bible canon and crystallized what would become Talmudic tradition. If documents were to surface that provide a snapshot of Judaic thought and practice just before this council, it could upend millennia of precedent and identity.<p>In a broader context, discovering pre-Jamnia ethnographic sources could significantly change our understanding of how Judaism adapted and evolved in the aftermath of the Second Temple&#x27;s destruction. This could lead to far-reaching questions. How much of the Talmudic tradition was actually a post-hoc rationalization or systematization of beliefs and practices that were far more fluid before the Council of Jamnia? How much anti-Romanism was pared away to prevent suppression? Moreover, how would such a revelation interact with or even challenge the validity of current Rabbinic and Orthodox Jewish practices?<p>The implications for the Judeo-Christian heritage as a whole are staggering. If both Christianity and Judaism could be traced back explicitly to politically or socially motivated machinations, rather than divinely inspired or time-honored traditions, the entire foundation of Judeo-Christian culture would come into question. In essence, the Vesuvius Challenge has the potential to destabilize two of the world’s major religious traditions at their historical roots. It is difficult to overstate the potential impacts.<p>The Vesuvius Challenge is not just an academic or technological endeavor. Its success could instigate an unparalleled epistemological crisis in religious studies and the humanities. It provides the opportunity to re-examine, with primary sources, the historical foundations of Western religious, cultural, and ultimately political traditions. We&#x27;re not just potentially rewriting history here; we&#x27;re reevaluating the very frameworks through which that history has been understood.