Wednesday Links

Reading the Herculaneum papyri, the extravagant claims of human resources, a history of equality, the first American response to C. S. Lewis, Evelyn Hofer’s "Dublin," and more.

Evelyn Hofer, “Mulligan’s pub, Joyce cat,” from Dublin.

Good morning! The 2023 Vesuvius Challenge was a $700,000 award that would be given to entrants who were able to decipher the most words from the CT scans of a charred papyrus scroll form the Herculaneum papyri. An Egyptian Ph.D. student in Berlin, a 21-year-old SpaceX intern, and a Swiss robotics student worked together to recover “hundreds of words across more than 15 columns of text, corresponding to around 5% of an entire scroll.” Here’s more from Nature:

The achievement has ignited the usually slow-moving world of ancient studies. It’s “what I always thought was a pipe dream coming true”, says Kenneth Lapatin, curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California, who was not involved in the contest. The revealed text discusses sources of pleasure including music, the taste of capers and the colour purple . . . The scroll is one of hundreds of intact papyri excavated in the eighteenth century from a luxury Roman villa in Herculaneum, Italy. These lumps of carbonized ash — known as the Herculaneum scrolls — are the only library that survives from the ancient world, but are too fragile to open.

And here’s a long write-up from Bloomberg on the Herculaneum papyri, what they might contain, and the attempt to read them.