In the 1750s, laborers excavating volcanic rock at Herculaneum unearthed hundreds of charred papyrus rolls from what used to be a private library. Antonio Piaggio and the scholars who came after him invested decades attempting to access their content. Some scrolls were cut in half, while others were treated with mercury vapor or pried apart with blades, resulting in disintegration into fragments or turning to black powder. Piaggio’s unrolling device managed to preserve certain texts by carefully opening the scrolls gradually, but it also led to the destruction of others. For approximately two and a half centuries following the scrolls’ emergence in the 1750s, attempting to read them involved the risk of physical damage.<\/p>\n
This situation changed on 25 June 2026, when the [Vesuvius Challenge announced](https:\/\/scrollprize.org\/firstscroll) that a scroll designated as PHerc. 1667 had been comprehensively read without unrolling, cutting, or manual touching.<\/p>\n
## What was actually achieved<\/p>\n
PHerc. 1667 was scanned while still rolled up, utilizing X-ray imaging from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble. Machine-learning algorithms trained to detect the faint traces of carbon ink on carbonized papyrus then mapped its surfaces in the scanning data, creating flat, readable pages in a process termed virtual unwrapping by the Vesuvius Challenge.<\/p>\n
The results yielded a continuous text instead of mere isolated words or sections. The scroll was recognized as a philosophical treatise on ethics, composed in Greek and dated to the second or third century BCE based on handwriting analysis. It addresses themes of human nature, impulse, and moral advancement, and mentions Aristocreon, a nephew of the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus. Researchers, including papyrologist Federica Nicolardi, have proposed that Chrysippus might be the author, although the title and authorship were lost along with the scroll’s opening, and the team has been meticulous in referring to this as a working hypothesis rather than an established conclusion, as [Smithsonian Magazine reported](https:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/smart-news\/scientists-have-deciphered-the-surviving-fragments-of-a-2000-year-old-philosophical-treatise-frozen-in-time-by-mount-vesuvius-eruption-180989036\/).<\/p>\n
This achievement stands apart from the much-publicized 2023 Grand Prize awarded by the Vesuvius Challenge. That earlier achievement, valued at $700,000, retrieved approximately 2,000 characters from sections of a different scroll, along with a separate $40,000 award for the first single word discovered (\u201cpurple\u201d) and a $60,000 prize for identifying a scroll\u2019s title. While those were significant milestones, they were fragments. PHerc. 1667 represents, according to the Vesuvius Challenge, the first instance where a Herculaneum scroll has been read entirely, from its outer wrap to its innermost layers.<\/p>\n
Additionally, a second scroll, PHerc. 139, also provided a title and author line in the same work cycle: Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8, indicating that the treatise consists of at least eight books.<\/p>\n
## Who did it<\/p>\n
The credit for the reading goes to the Vesuvius Challenge, a crowdsourced computer-vision contest initiated in 2023 by tech entrepreneurs Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, building on over a decade of scanning and software development by [University of Kentucky computer scientist Brent Seales](https:\/\/uknow.uky.edu\/research\/day-herculaneum-scrolls-began-speaking-again) and his EduceLab. Seales had long argued that ink invisible to the naked eye could still be detected within a sealed scroll due to its subtle effects on X-ray images; the competition opened this concept to thousands of external contributors with a financial incentive.<\/p>\n
Several of the individuals credited on PHerc. 1667 began as contestants rather than as professional papyrologists or computer scientists. Giorgio Angelotti, who headed the project team, and Sean Johnson, now part of the Vesuvius Challenge\u2019s technical staff, are both described by the organizers as former contestants who progressed into the key team. The papyrology aspect of the project was spearheaded by Nicolardi and Claudio Vergara, collaborating with the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, the custodian of the physical scrolls, and classicist Thomas Coward from the University of Bristol.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor nearly two millennia, many of these texts have been physically preserved but intellectually inaccessible,\u201d Seales remarked in a statement from the University of Kentucky. \u201cToday, we are finally able to read them.\u201d Nicolardi referred to it as \u201cthe return of a philosophical voice.\u201d<\/p>\n
## Why a full scroll is a different problem to a few lines<\/p>\n
Extracting a handful of characters from a scan poses a segmentation<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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