Why is Elon Musk fascinated with the papyri of Herculano, one of the great mysteries of antiquity? | Culture

Herculano’s papyri remain one of the great mysteries of antiquity. It is a huge library of two thousand years ago, which surely belonged to the father -in Like Pompeii. Most papyri are preserved in the Archaeological Museum of Naples and in the city library. At first glance, they seem more pieces of burned wood than books, although some have managed to be unrolled. Thanks to artificial intelligence, its content has begun to be known, for now only a very small part, something that until recently seemed impossible. A person seems especially fascinated by this process: Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, the main ally of President Donald Trump, who is dedicating himself to scrapping the US public administration.

Musk has demonstrated great interest in this huge library, discovered in the 18th century by archaeologists who, under the orders of the Bourbons, began to excavate the cities destroyed by Vesubio. Unlike Pompeya, Herculano was buried by mud, which has allowed a lot of organic matter, from furniture, doors or wooden beams, to the famous papyrus. Known as the Villa de los Papyros, in addition to the library one of the strangest and most provocative statues of the Roman world was found, which shows – tremendously explicitly – to the god Pan copulating with a goat. For centuries it has been speculated with the secrets that that library could hide, especially important texts of the Greek antiquity missing.

In early 2023, the University of Kentucky launched an international competition called Vesuvius Challenge (Vesuvio Challenge) with considerable economic reward – until 700,000 dollars (660,000 euros) – which would take to develop a program that, with the help of technology, be able to decipher the papyrus content. Until then, different institutions, such as the isituto per microeletronica and microsystemi of the Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR, a kind of Italian CSIC) and the European Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, located in Grenoble (France), had managed to decipher fragments of papyrus using Techniques such as X -rays. Vesuvius Challange intends to do it at an industrial scale.

In October 2023, a 21 -year -old Nebraska student, Luke Farritor, Spacex fellow, one of Musk’s companies, took $ 400,000 after being able to decipher a word: “Purple.” Interestingly, it is an associated color in ancient Rome with power – of fact, the commoners could not dress it. The Bloomberg agency discovered last week that Farritor, who is now 23 years old, is part of the Group of Youth that Musk has become a shock force of his demolition of the US administration, the famous puppies of the Government Efficiency Department (Doge ). It belongs to the group that, among other excesses, has helped close the US International Cooperation Agency, USAID.

In 2024, Nat Friedman, one of those responsible for Vesuvius Challenge, announced a new discovery: Farritor and two other students had managed to decipher 5% of a papyrus and had taken the fat prize. This time it was whole phrases. Friedman explained on Twitter: “The author – probably the philodemus epicurer philosopher – writes about music, food and how to enjoy the pleasures of life. In the final section, he mocks the anonymous ideological adversaries – what stoics? – that ‘they have nothing to say about pleasure, neither in general or in particular. ” Two days later, Musk responded to Friedman in the social network of which he owns: “The Musk Foundation will support this.”

The findings have continued. Last week, the Bodleian de Oxford library announced that it had managed to generate an image of a fragment of one of the three papyri that this institution retains since the nineteenth century. “While the specialists of the University of Oxford strive to interpret the text, the Vesubio challenge invites other people to join the collective effort to decipher their content,” the library explained in a statement. “One of the first words to translate was διατροπή In ancient Greek, which means disgust and appears twice in a few columns of the text. ” Disgust and purple: the combination of the first two deciphered words is still interesting.

However, historian Mary Beard, one of the great experts in the Roman world, author of books that have already become classics such as SPQR (Criticism), threw this weekend a jug of cold water especially the process. In the blog that keeps in the Times Literary SupplementTo Don’s Life, wrote an entry entitled ‘Unrolling the scrolls: from Herculano to Elon Musk’, in which he affirmed: “It is true that the possibilities of what could be found in the remains of this old collection of books are really wonderful. But there has been no recent discovery that has changed our understanding of the ancient world at all. I mean zero. Some more words have been identified in a scroll, but all that is part of the slow and gradual process of development of our understanding of antiquity, which very rarely has moments of ‘lightning’, and in this case it still has to bear many fruits substantial. ”

Until now Musk looked like a perfect candidate to be compared to an evil James Bond: Millionaire, Megalomaniac, with an immeasurable and convinced ego that he can change the world regardless of human consequences. However, much more since he did the Nazi greeting twice before a crowd on the day of the inauguration of Trump – ”Greetings to Hitler is a greeting to Hitler is a greeting to Hitler,” El Diario Alemán wrote in an editorial Die Zeit After Trump and Musk’s supporters tried to convince millions of people that they had not seen what they had seen -, begins to suspect the bad part of the third of the archaeologist’s adventures played by Harrison Ford, Indiana Jones and the last crusade. This is Walter Donovan, a millionaire willing to ally with the third Reich to find the Holy Grail. Donovan was looking for the source of eternal youth in the Grail. It is still a mystery what Musk intends to find in the Herculano Library. By the way, it is the film in which Indiana pronounces his famous phrase: “Nazis. I hate these uncles! ”