Science Archaeology Oldest known'Odyssey' fragment on display in New York City Watch Nolan's'The Odyssey' in movie theaters, then go read a portion of Homer's'Odyssey' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. The earliest known fragment from the epic poem dates back to the third century BCE. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy .

Determining the chronology of ancient handwritten manuscripts is essential for reconstructing the evolution of ideas. For the Dead Sea Scrolls, this is particularly important. However, there is an almost complete lack of date-bearing manuscripts evenly distributed across the timeline and written in similar scripts available for palaeographic comparison. Here, we present Enoch, a state-of-the-art AI-based date-prediction model, trained on the basis of new radiocarbon-dated samples of the scrolls. Enoch uses established handwriting-style descriptors and applies Bayesian ridge regression. The challenge of this study is that the number of radiocarbon-dated manuscripts is small, while current machine learning requires an abundance of training data. We show that by using combined angular and allographic writing style feature vectors and applying Bayesian ridge regression, Enoch could predict the radiocarbon-based dates from style, supported by leave-one-out validation, with varied MAEs of 27.9 to 30.7 years relative to the radiocarbon dating. Enoch was then used to estimate the dates of 135 unseen manuscripts, revealing that 79 per cent of the samples were considered 'realistic' upon palaeographic post-hoc evaluation. We present a new chronology of the scrolls. The radiocarbon ranges and Enoch's style-based predictions are often older than the traditionally assumed palaeographic estimates. In the range of 300-50 BCE, Enoch's date prediction provides an improved granularity. The study is in line with current developments in multimodal machine-learning techniques, and the methods can be used for date prediction in other partially-dated manuscript collections. This research shows how Enoch's quantitative, probability-based approach can be a tool for palaeographers and historians, re-dating ancient Jewish key texts and contributing to current debates on Jewish and Christian origins.

Apollo (left, his head shining), god of light, prophesy, music, and the arts of civilization, talks to god Hephaistos (closer to Apollo) and the 4 Cyclopes who made the thunderbolt for Zeus. In fact, machines and products of craftsmanship were part of the fabric of Greek culture, both political and religious. Even gods (Prometheus, Metis, Athena, and Hephaistos) protected the technological civilization of the Greeks. Indeed, the gods created models of craftsmanship that triggered the Greek imagination for a scientific and technological understanding of the Cosmos. The Cyclopes were the earliest engineering geniuses in Greek culture. They manufactured the almighty thunderbolt for Zeus to bring the war among the gods to an end. But the thunderbolt made Zeus supreme. That mythology, which the Greeks considered early history, provided the metaphysics of zeal and success in technical work.