Sealed Herculaneum scroll read end-to-end for the first time, virtually unrolled

Researchers from the Vesuvius Challenge have digitally unrolled and transcribed an entire carbonized Herculaneum scroll, PHerc. 1667, without physically opening it — the first time a rolled scroll from the Vesuvius-buried library has been read continuously from start to finish. The team scanned the blackened roll with high-resolution phase-contrast X-ray microtomography on the BM18 beamline at the European Synchrotron in Grenoble, computationally reconstructed and flattened the wound papyrus into a readable surface, and trained machine-learning models to detect ink nearly indistinguishable from the charred substrate. Papyrologists then reviewed and transcribed the output, recovering the lower portions of roughly 22 columns of a Stoic ethics treatise dated to the 2nd century BC.

The announcement covers two further milestones that establish the method as repeatable rather than a one-off. In PHerc. Paris 4 (Scroll 1), a higher-resolution scan made ink directly visible in the 3D X-ray volume and matched the 2023 Grand Prize reading one-to-one — independent confirmation from better data that the technique produces real text. In a third scroll, PHerc. 139, the team recovered the title and authorship, identifying it as Philodemus’s On Gods, Book 8, demonstrating that a sealed roll’s contents can be cataloged before any body text is studied.

The significance is twofold. Technically, the pipeline scales: hundreds of sealed scrolls remain, and the approach is built to be applied to all of them. Procedurally, it is a case study in open science — the tomographic data, reconstructed surfaces, transcriptions, and code are released under a Creative Commons license on GitHub and at scrollprize.org/data, so anyone can verify or extend the work. Notably, much of the research team began as contestants in the public, donation-funded competition co-founded by Brent Seales, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross, then were recruited after winning prizes — the breakthrough was largely produced by the global community the challenge created.