I'm a little bit surprised that all they got from that section of text was the word "purple". I mean it's a pretty amazing restoration, it looks like there's a whole lot more than one decipherable word there!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Lol I missed this image entirely.

I can definitely see the word porphyry here, which is super cool, but I forgot that the Greeks and Romans had another annoying resource-saving technique of not putting spaces between words or sometimes just using interpuncts•like•this. We didn't start using word spaces in texts until centuries later.

I can get behind continuous writing when the word boundaries are otherwise obvious, but it's super irritating for foreigners hundreds of years later trying to make out the details.

The researchers got fucking lucky this person had nice educated handwriting, at least. Sometimes you just get shit like this grocery list instead.