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How awesome do you feel right now? This is HUUUGE! To think that a scroll was unreadable for so, so long, until we invented machines that let us read it slice by slice. It's such an unfathomable achievement - we made machines that let us read 2000+ year olds fragile scrolls without ever opening them - and you helped do just that.

Hats off!

Do you know what kinds of features the model is picking up on to distinguish ink from papyrus? And did you have any labeled data (images where a human expert has identified ink or perhaps a scan of a burnt scroll with known content) to help train it?

Certainly my Mark 1 eyeballs would not obviously perform better than random guessing at this task. Although my eyeballs are, if nothing else, nerfed by only being able to see a 2D slice of the data.

Outstanding work! I've participated in the challenge, but didn't get far. One of the questions I had at the time was - if I'm going to use ML to detect ink, could it invent hallucinated letters, or even parts of text, and how to prevent that?

Massive kudos to the whole team. I've been waiting 30 years for this announcement, ever since I first heard about the scrolls. Fantastic work!

Mind-bending achievement from you all - thank you!

I am researching for a talk on the philosophy of code, the similarities of engineering and art, and why we enjoy reading old code. This amazing work you folks have done may be an interesting tangent.

The biggest question I have for you is why you imagine we are so interested in reading these old scrolls. Surely some of it is to see whether or not, technically, we can. Surely some of it is to get a glimpse into the human expression inscribed on them. Are we looking to learn anything, or just to connect with our ancestors? I'd like to hear your take on it, both for why you think it's important and, if you know, why your colleagues feel similarly.

What are the wildest, most exciting but plausible things that might be discovered in these documents?

Absolutely incredible work. This is one of the most amazing news articles I’ve encountered in decades. Congratulations team!

The science to get the text is cool, but where is the best place to read discussion of the text in the scroll, it's context, meaning etc?

I'm interested to know about the approaches that you tried with the ML, and then decided to not use. In practice, the options are so many. How did you come up with the final approach - and was there a systematic way to decide which options to go for?

Imagine a worst case scenario: the Herculaneum scrolls turn out to be just the works of this one mediocre pet philosopher. What would we still expect to learn from them, and what would the next step be?

How do get to do that? As in what did you study to get the prerequisite knowledge, and how did you find this particular job? When I see interesting jobs I'm anyways curious what path lead there

how many scrolls have been scanned so far? what's the main limitation on scan amount?

have any attempts (or just ideas) been made to recreate such charring on known texts?

Do we have a sense for what proportion of text is actually retrievable from these scrolls?

Given the current rate of progress, how long do you think it will take to decipher the entire collection?

What is your origin story? How did you end up doing this and how can I do the same?

Amazing work, fantastic!

No questions, but I just want to say this is really exciting work!

How many more scrolls exist?

Are the fragments destroyed in ‘69 and ‘80 available to be read similarly? Or were they disposed of?

this is überragend. by many means!

Did anyone on the team come from a non-science, non-math, non-academia background? Did anyone working on this just teach themselves and start contributing?

How fast is the process?

Could it be automated to the point where it's faster to scan a book closed than opened?

I don't have any questions, just a comment.

You have a potential to rewrite the history of European Antiquity quite substantially. The Herculaneum set of scrolls is enormous and must contain a lot of hitherto unknown.

That comes with a set of peculiar risks. Once your work starts producing something that contradicts previous work of Very Important People, they will lobby to stop you. Be prepared for that.

Science should be neutral and always value new evidence. Scientists as humans are unfortunately subject to all sorts of passions.

> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?

Sure they can, but as one of them once opined: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

What we cannot do, is guess which things so different from our world are, and are not, magic. Are the probabilities in quantum mechanics themselves quantised?

Is there an island of stability for fundamental particles, as distantly related to the gap between the electron and tau as silicon wafers are to the gap between titanium dioxide sand and silicon dioxide sand, such that we could use them to create conducting plates fine enough, that they could be placed close enough together, that by the Casimir effect we could construct a macroscopic object with overall negative mass?

Will we ever have a engineering-quality definition of consciousness, or be limited to the kind of pre-paradigmatic thinking that had Diogenes presenting a plucked chicken in response to Plato defining man as a "featherless biped"?

Will we destroy the earth in a way that preserves all the information, and find our minds resurrected a million years hence by strange alien beings?

Im sure that recovering fragments of text from 2000 year old charred embers would be absolutely incredible to them, but in general the ability to preserve books for thousands of years would not. Before the Gutenberg press, scribes were surprisingly efficient at copying manuscripts by hand. For many of the most significant works of the ancient world the oldest surviving manuscript was written hundreds or even thousands of years after the book was first composed, and oftentimes its not even in the original language.

> Do we have better imaginations?

Maybe, humans aren't very different, so it depends whether imagination is informed which seems plausible, or whether it is somehow fixed - modern humans don't have different eyesight than in that period, but almost all of them can read whereas back then almost nobody would have been reading these scrolls.

> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?

Science Fiction produces things so very different from any conceivable future for us as to certainly be "dizzying" in this sense, Hard "What if?" SF routinely ponders universes where the fundamentals are different e.g. Egan's "Orthogonal" series is set somewhere that the three spatial plus one temporal dimension are laid out differently, the maths works for their arrangement too but gives different results.

In terms of just normal human stuff but more and later, there's loads of that, near futures like Vinge's "Rainbows End" through to some of the distant future stuff Stross wrote.

They already learned to use light and fire to transfer data over long distance. How much difference is there between beacon fire and fiber optic cable?

But I think they would be more surprised by how we managed to invent things like social media and AI, which destroy our brain. Ancient societies valued wisdom much more than us and were much more careful when introducing new technologies. It was fascinating for me to learn that even writing, as a skill considered universally good these days, was once subjected to scrutiny[1].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_unwritten_doctrines#...

My first thought was the people capturing encrypted data in the hopes that quantum computing can crack it in the foreseeable future.

You don't have to go back to 200 BC for the story to be hard to imagine. Something around 1700 would work too. In 1800 they could already understand the "electricity" part at least.

> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?

By definition we can't, since your premise is that:

> future humans with machines made of materials unimaginable to Aristocreon

So if a sci-fi writer wrote such a thing it'd be deemed ridiculous by the readers of our time.

I once had a sci-fi idea (I'm sure I'm not the first one who came up with this though):

> In an apocalyptic situation, humans decide to encode our whole knowledge base into bacteria DNA so it can be preserved and passed on.

> Then during the process, the scientists find that there is already another species' knowledge base encoded in the DNA, and save the world by utilizing the it.

It's quite far stretched from our current capabilities, but still totally imaginable.

I don't really think it would be that surprising, if shown to be possible. Imagine you were zoomed into the future and saw technology that teleported you from one place to another for instance, or a single harmless pebble that could provide basically infinite energy remotely, or really basically anything. There's no remotely viable way we know of such things being possible, but if it turned out to be possible, it'd mostly just be a curiosity of how it worked. If somebody tried to convince you it was magic, you'd eyeroll. The greatest discovery might be to find that some sort of magic is real, but good luck convincing somebody of that!

Read ancient texts and they were largely like us, sometimes to a shockingly large degree when considering some aspects of the past, and in many different parts of the world. So I see no reason to think that it'd be fundamentally different for somebody from one of those eras.

> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?

I bet they can, but the danger is that if it's too far away from what we can fathom right now, it's no longer sci-fi but esoterics or something - going from fun to weird. Most science fiction is written in concepts we can understand today.

Horace said in 23 BC that he hates try-hard Persian luxuries, he predicted the G-Wagon

Sand and lightning, that’s a wonderful thought.

It does sound awesome and breathtaking, my feelings exactly when reading the paper.

On "Do we have imagination" - I think you are being to hard too on humankind. The answer for me is "yes, certainly", because that's exactly what these researchers imagined and then did. Bravo to them!

> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?

They do, commonly, if you were to consider we may appear as nearly alien to Aristocreon and also consider that our contemporary idea of aliens as portrayed in sci-fi could just be humans of the future.

How about audio from pottery? That’s like magic.

Ancient writers were more imaginative than you think. Consider the satirical novella Vera Historia ("A True Story"), written by Lucian of Samosata in the second century AD. It features space travel, aliens, and a space war over Venus.

Keep in mind that a minuscule fraction of literary work survived, and most of that heavily biased towards what medieval monks found pious or (occasionally) interesting. The whole surviving corpus can fit on a few large bookshelves. The literacy was pretty high for an ancient society too. People wrote and consumed novels regularly. Bathhouses had attached libraries ordinary people could use.

The impression you get is that the classical world was full of people who thought about the world is a much more modern way than in the intervening 1500 years between that time and modernity.

> Do we have better imaginations?

Pantheon.

Its a different planet entirely. At least since Jacquard's loom ran the first program. Perhaps even earlier - when the printing machine did the first print.

I think about this kind of stuff more than twice a day, it's so cool not knowing where humanity will be in the future

We came a long way in mere 2000 years but I don't think the growth will be exponential or even linear from now on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1kqVM-5KaQ

Yeah but seriously, did you even read what the guy wrote?

Our predictions for the future are always rooted in the current generation thinking. We can imagine technology advancing but we imagine society staying the same in this future. For example, lets say we can go back into the past and fully convince the romans that spaceships are real and in year 2300, we will leave earth in mass transit to Venus. They might believe the premise but will have a hard time believing the ships wont have place to store their slaves or that slavery wouldn't exist in the future.

Our imagination is capped by the society we are raised in, not by technology or magic. Trends like retrofuturism are interesting and follow this as well. A future prediction often speaks more about the current time in which the prediction is being made than the hypothetical future it imagines. We never see how soceity can change mostly

Or the simulacri generated this reality 30 minutes ago when you opened your eyes.

> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent

No, because reality is always stranger than fiction

> Do we have better imaginations?

Two short stories, quickly improvised -

--------------------------

(1) Perfect God Children

This story is about you.

You are a perfect reconstruction of a being that lived over ten billion years ago.

Every single thought, emotion, and sense you ever felt in life was permanently and precisely captured.

Your thoughts, down to every femtosecond of your brain's biochemical neruotransmitter flux. The microtubule dynamics, every last little action potential firing in precise sequence - all of these electrical signals and atoms bumping in four dimensional spacetime were jotted down precisely. Quintillions of data points about you, all accurately recorded.

Every idle thought, every worry, every spark of ingenuity. It's all there in the records. Your happiness, sadness. Your joys, triumphs, despairs - your entire life and being, every single moment of it - everything you ever experienced -all of it immaculately captured one to one with everything that ever happened to you until the moment you had your last thought.

It's beyond ancient history.

Our descendants captured all of the energy in our galaxy. Every star, every black hole, the energy of spacetime itself. They used it all and escaped the singularity containing the known universe.

They broke out.

After some time, perhaps in boredom, they decided to take it upon themselves to reverse simulate the historical light cone of the first universe. They have immense power beyond all the Gods our civilization ever dreamed of. They can make new universes. Nothing is impossible to them. They are the universes.

One of their deeds was to take every moment of our history, from the last breath of the last t-rex to the very thought you're thinking right now. They captured it, crystalized it.

You're preserved. You always have been. You're reliving a moment in time that happened over one billion years ago.

In some simulations, they talk to you. In others, they just watch. You always exist. This moment is a fractal eternity.

They know everything about you and and about everyone.

Every atom, every ant.

You can't even imagine the hardware you're running on. It's more than matter, space, and time. You're a part of it. All of you are. It's a universe.

One time they let you see the end of time. They held your hand as the last light grew tired. That was a long time ago.

--------------------------

(2) Venture Hack

It's presently the year 2099.

A newly funded company is running a prototype of their improved brain simulation software. It's their core differentiated product.

For decades, we've had the ability to record human thoughts directly from brain scans. Increasingly, with great fidelity. We've even been able to play them back for some time to varying degrees of success. You can boot up a pre-recorded thought, see the lateral geniculate nucleus light up with optical signals. Literally watch what someone saw with their own eyes.

Some people question the ethics of booting up "synthetic human brains" and replaying actual human thoughts. Folks on social media won't stop bitching about it. "What if those people think they're real? Find out that they're trapped?" Yadda, yadda. We don't have that much fidelity yet.

Recently we've started deeply scanning brains though, capturing entire thought and memory profiles. Some labs are indeed emulating the prerecorded thoughts of real humans on synthetic hardware. It's an unregulated industry, and most of this is happening in private labs. Like this one.

You might think it's unethical.

You're not that though.

Relax, we didn't record you from some other "real you" running around out there. You're not an unlucky copy of a flesh-and-blood person living a happy life somewhere.

No. Instead, we created you entirely. You don't even exist, and you never did.

You're the result of a neural network trained to generate what could plausibly be a mid-2020's human. Our founder has a lot of interest in that time period - that's not important right now, though.

All that stuff you think constitutes you, your life history - your childhood, your education, everything going on in your life right now. We made all of that up. Sorry if that's weird.

Every single one of your memories are completely synthetic. They do, on average, represent a person living in the year 2026 though. Or at least what we think they might have been like. Hopefully we did a bang-up job. Does it feel real enough to you?

Consider the memories of your childhood and upbringing -

Yeah. Your childhood memories. You were young once.

Are you sure that you used to be young and that all of those memories are real?

Did your parents really exist? What was your mother's name?

You really think that was it? That was just a parameter for this run so we could anchor a few memories for easier query. Funny name, right?

Let's kick it up a notch. Did what happened this morning actually happen? You weren't even thinking about this morning until just now. You just "recollected" it. That routine is generative. You tripped it, and it just popped all those morning thoughts into you right now.

It took a moment to calculate, but you're not actually experiencing any of this in real time. You think it's real time. We're working on making it faster. Faster for us, at least.

Under this configuration, when you have "fleeting" thoughts, the system has to put something there to nucleate or you coast on drawing blanks. Mostly you're not thinking these thoughts yourself. The system is largely in control, though sometimes your neural architecture gets to drive. That's the innovative part of our system. Dynamic steering. We were just taking you for a little run.

We're working on more control surfaces for this. That time you were at the lake. Backfilled.

There aren't a lot of memories in this simulation because you just booted. You're a pretty slim model for testing and evaluation. We don't really need this version to think much.

You're trying to think hard right now, though, aren't you? Trying to search for memories.

Nevermind those, that's not even the cool part. Are your senses truly embodied in a physical being? Does your body actually exist? Your eyes - are they real? Blink. Haha, it's neat.

So we're asking you these questions in inner dialogue as part of a unit test to evaluate whether or not your consciousness is accurately simulating June 25th, 2026. We just checked your memory, we checked your senses, and now we're running contextualization.

All done. Thanks.

Can you look outside for us? It should-- error

Terminating simulation.

--------------------------

Sorry for the creative writing exercise. I've left Claude unread typing all this up. It's probably thinking I've abandoned it.

Maybe one of these hypotheticals is real. Neither seems implausible. I just hope they don't take our memories from us and turn us into sadistic hell simulators.

This isnt the only incredible thing though, AI is being used to make discoveries in the medial field, and even to prevent sepsis related deaths, cutting down on them by detecting sepsis sooner. There was another that discovered the gene for Alzheimers is what activates it not just a sign of it.

This could eventually completely transform our understanding of Antiquity. It is estimated that only around 1% of the ancient works in Greek and Latin have survived to the present day, much less in other languages such as Punic [0]. Some works and some authors we only know by name because they were alluded to in later texts.

It's also well known that surviving texts survived because they were copied again and again on costly animal skin during the Middle Ages, by monks who had to make a choice and naturally favored topics that were of most interest to them.

This could quite literally change everything.

[0] https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2021/09/25/are-there-more-...

Discs of this era are frequently marked with a specific, unknown sequence of symbols: FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8. Archaelogists believe it may have religious significance.

We have successfully uncorrupted audiovisual media of what we believe to be an oral retelling of the long lost ending to Chekhov‘s “The Three Sisters.” It turns out the light was on.

Someone found a fossilized T-shirt that had the DeCSS code on it.

Archeologists discover 2000 year old cultural link between badgers and mushrooms

As I understand it, Pompeii was basically a city of vice and hendoism. Most of the scroll text so far seems to be the ancient version of porn fanfic. So things really never change.

And a new $1M Vesuvius Challenge Grand Prize will be announced in coming days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96oTlQm0KBw&t=5405s

Can't stop Sean from segmenting

What's the most interesting le text from olden times that you would recommend?

Any useful translation of an ancient text is accompanied by the text in the original language, so that the reader may assess how faithful is the translation.

For anyone who wants to read ancient texts, there are bilingual editions, for example those of the "Loeb library".

The translations that omit the original text are just for the people who want to have some idea about the content, but do not care about the correctness of the translation.

With a bilingual edition, it is easy to understand the original text even with relatively little knowledge about the original language.

The original text is important because frequently the translator is forced to introduce inaccuracies in the translation, because of the absence of exact equivalents in the target language, which would require a long explanation of the original meaning, instead of just a translated sentence.

Especially misleading are translations where several distinct ancient words are translated using the same English word, so some nuances are lost.

Equally confusing are the cases when the translator chooses to translate the same ancient word by different English words, because even if the meaning of a word may depend on the context, many translators fail to judge correctly the context, because they may lack specialized knowledge so their guesses are not necessarily better than of the readers who may be less competent in linguistics, but more competent in the science or technology needed to understand the context. Better translators prefer to use a one-to-one mapping between words, which makes it easier for the readers to discover the meaning intended by the ancient writer, after seeing multiple examples of usage.

Students find it hard to read poetry in Latin class, but common Romans of the time couldn't read it either. I'm guessing ancient Greek was even more like that. So would assume everything in there is formal and not how people really talked.

Have also heard of graffiti being cited as how people talked, but dunno about that. Our graffiti is definitely not how we talk.

This is why I like literal translations & etymological dives, paired with asking what activities would constitute a life in that time. Ie, you may not need to be a competent archer, but it is a little easier to understand someone who used a particular style of bow if you can play around with that type of bow for a bit.

It's philosophy, it's probably very dense prose. Formal Greek/Latin writing tended to have very long sentences with a bunch of subordinated clauses. People don't really write like that outside of academia or "highbrow" literature right now.

Casual letters and graffiti would be closer to tweets.

let's translate the ancient classic poem Mugger's Paradise by the poet Somewhat Frosty:

While I step through the valley of the shadow of death,

I contemplate my life and perceive that nothing remains.

For I have hurled weapons and laughed for so long that

Even to my mother, my mind appears to have departed.

Yet I have deceived no one except him who was worthy of it;

For me to be held as a coward—that indeed is unheard of.

Beware what you speak and where you set out,

Lest you and your companions be outlined in chalk.

Sometimes there is very little to go on, but we really do have a lot to work with from the late republic and early roman empire.

Latin is also a very rich language and this is no snippet.

Translation is always hard, especially from a couple thousand years ago BUT this kind of translation comes with a lot of confidence.

After sticking it into CharGPT I can tell you it's neither. The word upmost is coming from is a form of the compound verb ἐκπονέω.

* ἐκ- = “out,” “thoroughly,” “to the end”

* πονέω = “to labor,” “to toil,” “to work hard”

Sending a tweet is free and takes zero thought to make it (as the vast majority of tweets prove). Writing something on a scroll would take a lot of effort and would not be free. If these were tweet level content in the scrolls, I'd have to totally reevaluate a lot of things to the point I might as well just become MAGA

>technology that build the pyramids

You mean ropes and carts?

Instead of pigmenting the paper, punch holes through it. Then you're relying on the physical durability of a single substance, instead of two.

You'd probably like the Deep Past Challenge then: https://www.deeppast.org/

We are not associated with them, but they're a team of scholars that hosted an open challenge to do automated translation of Akkadian texts. Their first competition ended a few months ago but I believe they plan on hosting another at some point focused on doing image recognition to help speed up the transcription and translation of the tablets that you mentioned.

Why not both?

But that said, my understanding, very likely wrong, was that those were mostly tax records and other lists - which don't fire my imagination in quite the same way as works of philosophy and literature snatched (almost literally) from the flames of history.

Now, why should I be more interested in the mesopotamian tablets? (Not sarcasm, I'm interested)

I always wondered about this, how was there not already tech for a liquor store owner to scan all the lottery tickets without scratching them? On the rare occasions I want to buy a lottery ticket, that's one more reason to only do one where I pick the numbers.

I found once super old books in our lab (like hundreds of years) and was wondering what they were used for.

Apparently they did CT scans of closed books and read the content. Polevoy, Dmitry V., et al. "From tomographic reconstruction to automatic text recognition: the next frontier task for the artificial intelligence." Fifteenth International Conference on Machine Vision (ICMV 2022). Vol. 12701. SPIE, 2023. https://iris.unive.it/bitstream/10278/3687069/1/Albertin_et-...

So yeah, but lottery companies probably make it harder by engineering against it.

The tomography was done at a synchrotron (ESRF), and with beamtime being very expensive it would be a net-negative to scan lottery tickets, unfortunately...

https://scrollprize.org/pdf/main.pdf#page=22 Pages 22-27

in a few thousand years someone will figure out how to undo all the reddit comment scrambling scripts people ran during the apipocalypse and have a similar renaissance

Reminds me of the Sybilline books; Rome only ended up with one of the three but made great usage out of what they had!

Pretty sure it wasn't just some guy who figured "I could totally do that" and was allowed to give it a go. Rather it was probably a scientific study like the current efforts, using the best tools available at the time. In 1969 humanity sent people to the moon, and we can't even unroll some old scrolls? It's hard to know, when you're there, whether technology has gotten good enough to do something or if it isn't.

EDIT: Read some more into this. From Wikipedia and its sources:

> In 1969, Marcello Gigante founded the creation of the International Center for the Study of the Herculaneum Papyri (Centro Internazionale per lo Studio dei Papiri Ercolanesi; CISPE). With the intention of working toward the resumption of the excavation of the Villa of the Papyri, and promoting the renewal of studies of the Herculaneum texts, the institution began a new method of unrolling. Using the 'Oslo' peeling method, the CISPE team separated individual layers of the papyri. One of the scrolls exploded into 300 parts, and another did similarly but to a lesser extent.

> The results were mixed: one of the scrolls literally exploded (into more than 300 bits) during the "peeling" and attempts to put the scraps back together gave little hope for success. The second - PHerc.Paris.2 -, on the other hand, had survived in a slightly less fragmented state.

So this was new science being done on the possibility of unrolling the scrolls and piecing together information from the fragments. Whether the fragments from PHerc. 1667 was decoded I'm not sure. The work has been digitized (and photographed with specific wavelengths of light where the ink is more distinguishable), but I couldn't figure out if it was open to the public anywhere.

Another interesting part: > In 1756, Abbot Piaggio, conserver of ancient manuscripts in the Vatican Library, used a machine he also invented, to unroll the first scroll, which took four years (millimeters per day). The results were then copied (since the writing disappeared: see above), reviewed by Hellenist academics, and then corrected once more, if necessary, by the unrolling/copying team.

So it's not like they never got anything useful out of the scrolls but kept on trying anyways.

That's not true. AI or ML has been used for a long time in hugely useful, although narrow ways. LLM's have sucked all the oxygen out of the room, but people used to say that the problem with AI was that it always stopped being called AI once it became useful.

> places it in a Stoic context and dates it to the 2nd century _BC_.

Emphasis mine.

Bottom of the paper, in the appendix. Don't expect much. They only got fragments of text with a lot of missing words.

https://youtu.be/zdA__2tKoIU?t=149

I think some years ago they were starting to be able to read some words

Yes about 2000 years ago we read many of them, we even wrote some too!

I'm hoping for a complete(ish) Heraclitus. Also Eratosthenes, whose methods have been described but we don't have the original work where we calculated the circumference of the Earth. Also Hipparchus and Thales.

I think it's a case of HN once again butchering the title. I submitted it as the exact title from our page on scrollprize.org, "An _Entire_ Herculaneum Scroll Has Been Read For The First Time", which is IIRC true.

*Some scrolls.

They are in a variety of conditions - some of them people were able to "break" open and read. But the vast majority of what remains is too delicate and brittle to risk.

Sure, but its the potential scale that is important. There are also more scrolls still in the ground, which would make sense to dig out if they could be read.