AI Finally Read a 2,000-Year-Old Herculaneum Scroll in Full
A scroll that scholars once wrote off as unreadable, damaged so badly by earlier handling that it earned a readability score of zero, has finally given up its text. Nobody had to unroll it to get there.
A Library Sealed by Disaster
For almost 2,000 years, the carbonized library of Herculaneum has kept a cruel bargain. Its scrolls survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, but only by becoming too fragile to open. To read one was to destroy it. Hundreds of rolls had therefore remained sealed, their contents preserved yet completely unreachable.
On June 25, 2026, that changed. The Vesuvius Challenge, an international research effort, announced it had completely virtually unwrapped and read PHerc. 1667, known within the project as Scroll 4, without ever touching its pages. It marked the first time a rolled Herculaneum papyrus had been digitally unrolled and read in full, end to end, and made available for sustained scholarly study.
Already Damaged Before Science Caught Up
PHerc. 1667 is what survives of a larger roll. Earlier attempts to open it by hand, in the nineteenth century and again in 1969 and the 1980s, destroyed its outer layers and left only a compact inner core, about 8 centimeters of an original height that likely reached 19 to 24 centimeters. That kind of damage had long made the scroll a poor candidate for physical conservation, and it sat unread for decades as a result.
From that surviving portion, researchers have now recovered and read the text in full: the lower parts of some twenty-two columns of ancient Greek, transcribed and reviewed by papyrologists. It is the first time the preserved text of a rolled Herculaneum scroll has been read continuously, end to end, rather than in isolated words or scattered patches.
How You Read a Scroll Without Opening It
The process started with high-resolution phase-contrast X-ray microtomography, carried out on the BM18 beamline at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, an instrument capable of resolving the wafer-thin, densely packed layers hidden inside a Herculaneum roll. The work was carried out in collaboration with the National Library of Naples “Vittorio Emanuele III,” which safeguards the Herculaneum papyri.
From those scan volumes, the team reconstructed the scroll’s internal geometry, traced its spiraled sheet, and flattened it into a readable virtual surface. Machine-learning models were then trained to detect ink that is almost indistinguishable from the carbonized papyrus beneath it to the naked eye. Every resulting reading was examined and transcribed by papyrologists before being accepted.
What the Scroll Actually Says
The recovered text is a philosophical treatise on ethics, and the evidence points squarely to a Stoic work. It turns on questions of human nature, impulse, and the moral progress of human beings, and its final preserved column names Aristocreon, nephew and disciple of the great Stoic philosopher Chrysippus. That detail, combined with the text’s language and themes, places the work in a Stoic context and dates it to the 2nd century BC.
Because the papyrus itself is damaged, the readings remain fragmentary in places, with gaps where the surface has been lost entirely. Even so, several passages can now be read clearly for the first time in two thousand years. One recovered passage states: “we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature.” Another reads: “having strained ourselves to the utmost through research and learning, possessing the same practical wisdom.” A third addresses what happiness actually requires, arguing that even from opposite evils there will be nothing good, nothing beautiful, nothing bad, nor anything ugly, nor happiness itself, without the right underlying goods in place.
Two More Scrolls Give Up Their Secrets
The breakthrough extended to two additional scrolls examined during the same research effort. In PHerc. Paris 4, known to the project as Scroll 1, a higher-resolution imaging technique made ink directly visible inside the scroll itself in three-dimensional X-ray data for the first time. Once segmented in 3D and projected back onto the unwrapped page, that ink matched the text already read during the 2023 Vesuvius Challenge Grand Prize one to one, providing independent confirmation, from entirely different data, that the original reading was accurate.
A third scroll, PHerc. 139, yielded something different but equally valuable: its title and author attribution. The work was identified as Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8, a treatise by the Epicurean philosopher whose surviving writings already fill a substantial portion of the Herculaneum library. Being able to read the title of a still-sealed scroll tells scholars what a roll contains before a single column of its body has even been studied.
A Prize That Built Its Own Research Team
The virtual unwrapping technique itself was pioneered years earlier at EduceLab under principal investigator Professor Brent Seales. In 2023, Seales opened his lab’s imaging and software technology to the Vesuvius Challenge, a public, donation-funded effort he co-founded with Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross specifically to read the scrolls out in the open, with a global community invited to take up the problem. The Challenge’s first deciphered letters and its 2023 Grand Prize were both won by independent contestants working from openly released data.
What followed is less widely known. Most of the Vesuvius Challenge’s current research team first arrived as ordinary contestants. They entered the open competition, won prizes for genuine breakthroughs, and were then recruited onto the very team that has now read an entire scroll in full. In large part, the people behind this achievement are the global community the competition itself created.
Open by Design
Every part of the underlying work has been released publicly. The tomographic scan data, the reconstructed surfaces, and the full transcriptions have all been released under a Creative Commons license, archived at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, with the accompanying code posted openly as well. Anyone can check the work, build on it, or apply the same method to scrolls that remain unread.
Hundreds of scrolls from the Herculaneum library are still sealed, an entire trove of ancient philosophy, poetry, and prose waiting to be read for the first time since antiquity. With a proven, fully open method now in hand, researchers expect the pace of new discoveries from this carbonized library to accelerate considerably in the years ahead.
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