Computational Platforms for Deciphering Ancient Greek Papyrus Fragments

Abstract

In 79 AD, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius instantly turned hundreds of papyrus scrolls from ancient Herculaneum into carbon-carbon fragments. The scrolls contain valuable writings by Greek philosophers of the time, including the works of the “Epicurean Philodemus”. They were identified using X-ray phase contrast tomography. However, only a small part of the text hidden in the scrolls has been recovered. One of the challenges in studying the Herculaneum papyri is their virtual unfolding, due to their extremely complex structure and three-dimensional arrangement. In this paper, we discuss a computational platform for the virtual unfolding procedure and show the results of its application to two fragments of the Herculaneum Papyrus. This method paves the way for future research and further interpretation of larger sections of text hidden in the carbonized Herculaneum papyrus. The paper also presents a computational pipeline for converting letter identifications into digital consensus transcriptions of papyrus fragments, using an interface to the Ancient Lives database. As a result, the paper provides an explanation of the usefulness of the pipeline solution in the context of additional computational projects aimed at further accelerating the text fragment identification process.