Title of work deciphered in sealed Herculaneum scroll via digital unwrapping

Significance of the find

• Commenters are enthusiastic: a first-century Roman private library, largely still buried and carbonized, can now be read without physically unrolling and destroying the scrolls.
• The library is valued as a rare window into pre‑Christian Roman intellectual life, unfiltered by later copyists.

Debate over calling it a “pagan library”

• One side: “Pagan” is a standard term in classics for pre‑Christian Roman polytheistic culture and helps situate the material in a broad era (pagan vs Christian Rome).
• Opposing side: The term is Christian‑centric, often pejorative in origin, and adds little information beyond “first‑century Roman”; it implicitly treats Christianity as the default lens.
• Sub‑threads argue:
  • Whether “pagan” is a technical scholarly term vs a slur.
  • Whether pre‑Christian works should be framed relative to Christianity at all, given Christianity’s marginal status in 79 AD.
  • Alternative framings: “pre‑Christian,” “monotheistic/Abrahamic vs others,” or just “Roman library.”

Christianity and textual survival

• Several comments note that most classical texts survived only via Christian monastic copying; this makes an untouched pre‑Christian collection especially valuable.
• Others highlight Christian suppression or destruction of some “pagan” texts and institutions as a factor in the small fraction of ancient literature that survives.

Technology and method

• Scrolls are excavated but not unrolled; they are CT‑scanned, then “virtually unwrapped” with segmentation and ink‑detection models.
• ML is used to:
  • Separate and flatten layers.
  • Classify tiny patches as ink vs non‑ink, trained on human‑identified examples.
• Interpretation of letters and words is done by human experts.

Reliability vs “hallucination”

• Some worry about “seeing” patterns in noise.
• Others counter:
  • Independent teams, using the same data, converged on the same reading.
  • A known author and work fit the recovered title.
  • The ML models do not have a Greek text corpus and operate only at the “ink/no‑ink” level; any overfitting would be human, not generative.

What was deciphered

• The scroll’s title was identified as a work of Philodemus (an Epicurean), specifically “On Vices” (part A).
• Commenters note the Greek forms visible and the paleographic details.

Archaeology, careers, and meta

• Some question whether destructive digging is still justified given these methods.
• There is interest from developers in contributing; one answer points to current job listings and the Vesuvius Challenge, but notes academia rarely hires external programmers.
• A few lament that the thread veers into culture‑war and terminology debate instead of technology.