You’ve probably already seen the news that the Vesuvius Challenge just announced a winner for their contest to read CT scans of carbonized scrolls from Herculaneum. The contest focused on about 5% of one scroll that turns out to be an Epicurean text. This is a big breakthrough that builds on the work done back in 2015 to digitally unroll the En Gedi scroll (blogged about here) and opens the possibility of reading more of the 800 or so carbonized scrolls recovered from the library of Herculaneum that was destroyed in AD 79. Naturally for ETC readers, the question arises whether there might be some biblical manuscripts among these 800.
You can read more about the prize and the prize winning team at scrollprize.org.
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| A section of scroll read for the first time since AD 79 |