Vesuvius Challenge: Digitally Unrolled a Herculaneum Scroll Never Opened for 2000 Years
Vesuvius Challenge: Digitally Unrolled a Herculaneum Scroll Never Opened for 2000 Years
A carbonized scroll from Herculaneum has been read from start to finish without ever being opened. The Vesuvius Challenge team announced on June 25 that they have digitally unrolled and fully deciphered PHerc. 1667, the scroll that the project community identifies as Scroll 4, sealed since the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. It is the first Herculaneum scroll to be fully recovered, column by column, without touching its pages.
For nearly two millennia, the carbonized library of Herculaneum imposed a cruel pact: the scrolls survived the eruption but became too fragile to be opened. Unrolling them by hand meant destroying them, and hundreds of volumes remained closed, their content preserved yet unreachable.
PHerc. 1667 is what remains of a larger scroll. Attempts to open it by hand, in the 19th century and then in 1969 and the 1980s, destroyed its outer layers, leaving only the more compact inner core, about 8 cm compared to an original height of 19-24 cm. From that surviving portion, the team reconstructed just over 1.4 meters of papyrus and around twenty columns of Greek, transcribed and revised by papyrologists.
The text is a philosophical treatise on ethics of Stoic origin, dated to the 2nd century BC. It revolves around human nature, impulse, and the moral progress of the individual. The last preserved column mentions Aristocreon, a grandson and disciple of the great Stoic Chrysippus, a reference that, along with the language and themes, situates the work within the Stoic realm. Due to surface damage, the readings remain fragmentary, with gaps where the papyrus is lost, but several passages become readable for the first time in two thousand years.
X-rays and Machine Learning Instead of a Scalpel
Reading no longer involves a blade. The scans were acquired using high-resolution phase contrast X-ray microtomography on the BM18 beamline of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, the only instrument capable of resolving the extremely thin and tightly wrapped layers of a Herculaneum scroll.
The work was conducted in collaboration with the National Library of Naples “Vittorio Emanuele III,” which houses the papyri. Starting from the volumes, the group reconstructed the scroll's geometry, traced and flattened its surface into a readable sheet, and trained machine learning models to identify the ink, almost indistinguishable from the underlying carbonized papyrus.
The results go beyond the single scroll. On PHerc. Paris 4 (the project's Scroll 1), a technique with even higher resolution made the ink directly visible in the three-dimensional X-ray data, segmentable in 3D and superimposable on the text read during the Grand Prize 2023 in a one-to-one correspondence, an independent confirmation that the reading is real.
On a third papyrus, PHerc. 139, the title and attribution were recovered: the work is identified as Philodemus, On the Gods, Book 8. Reading the title of a still-closed scroll allows scholars to know what it contains even before analyzing its body.
All material is open: tomographic data, reconstructed surfaces, and transcriptions are released under a Creative Commons license and archived at the ESRF, while the code is on GitHub. The Vesuvius Challenge, born in 2023 from an idea by Brent Seales with Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross following the pioneering work of EduceLab, makes it clear that the method is designed to scale. Hundreds of scrolls remain sealed, an entire library of philosophy and poetry to be brought to light one papyrus at a time.