UnLost - Uncovering Lost Knowledge from the Ancient Library of Herculaneum: Overcoming Damage and Reviving the Human Experience Using Physical Evidence, AI, and the Structuring of Diverse Data

ERC Synergy Abstract What does it mean to be lost? It is more than the mere inability to be found or located, which still offers the hope, or even expectation, of recovery in due time. A much more permanent ‘lostness’ due to damage, such as the loss of a house due to fire or the human loss of memory as we age. Lostness in this sense seems irrevocable, hopeless. We see it with relics, forgotten and fallen into obscurity; with objects that become hidden and invisible, fruitlessly unseen; in the massive amounts of information collected and stored but inaccessible and unrecognizable in any sense that enables true understanding. Today, new scientific approaches involving non-invasive imaging, AI, chemical and material analyses, and carefully curated, structured data offer hope of recovering that which appears irretrievably lost. UnLost aims to address every facet of lostness comprehensively by assembling a diverse group of experts to explore and recover one of the paradoxically most well-known and at the same time still lost collections in the world, the ancient Library of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum. What is today the sole surviving library from Roman times found itself both blessed and cursed by the fury of the eruption of Vesuvius, which shielded its precious books from the ravages of time and decay, but also, tragically, condemned them to carbonization and fragmentation. The UnLost team will unearth new questions and strive to solve both age-old and emerging challenges posed by this material, delivering outcomes in four crucial areas: novel technical methods to non-invasively reveal invisible text; structured data and metadata; a complete chemical and materials analysis across the collection; and attainment of new frontiers in physical conservation. This will start from untying the knots of scholarly ‘lostness’, bridging disciplinary gaps, and inspiring a new generation of scholars to embrace interdisciplinarity as the key for knowledge to become and remain UnLost.