AI helps read 2,000-year-old papyrus scroll PHerc 1667 as scientists fully unwrap it

A scroll so badly charred by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that scholars once gave it a readability score of zero has now been read—virtually unwrapped end to end, without a single layer being touched.

Researchers from the University of Kentucky and Naples announced the breakthrough Thursday at the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples, with the volcano that buried it nearly 2,000 years ago visible in the distance. The scroll, named PHerc. 1667, gave up nearly 1.5 metres of continuous Greek text across 20 columns, all of it surfaced with the help of artificial intelligence.PHerc. 1667 is among the oldest in the Herculaneum collection, dated to the second or possibly late third century BC.

It survives as only half its original self—about 8cm tall and 2cm wide—after centuries of failed attempts to physically pry it open flaked away its outer layers. Records from 1782 describe it as compressed but largely intact; the damage came later, from people trying to read it. When part of it was opened in the 1980s, it was declared unreadable.

How a charred scroll finally gave up its secrets

The work comes out of the Vesuvius Challenge, a global contest Brent Seales launched in 2023 with Silicon Valley backers Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, building on research he had been chipping away at since 2002.

The method starts with high-resolution micro-CT scans, done at Diamond Light Source in the UK and the ESRF in France. Some scans ran as large as 300 terabytes per scroll—the biggest dataset ESRF has ever produced.

AI trained to spot ink then reads the flattened layers."This scroll was deemed completely unreadable when part of it was opened in the 1980s," said papyrologist Federica Nicolardi. "But now, with virtual unwrapping, we can follow sustained arguments across multiple columns.

That's a transformational shift."

What the ancient text actually says

The contents read as a Stoic treatise on ethics, art and human behaviour—unusual, since the Herculaneum library is almost entirely Epicurean. Nicolardi's team suspects Chrysippus, the third head of the Stoic school, partly because the text names his nephew and pupil Aristocreon. It discusses hormē, or impulse, warning against unchecked behaviour, and phronēsis, practical wisdom, the highest Stoic virtue. One line reads: "We will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature."A second scroll, PHerc. 139, revealed the words "Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8," proving for the first time that the work ran to at least eight books rather than one. Researchers also pulled 70-plus columns from PHerc. 172, identified as "On Vices, Book 1."More than 600 scrolls remain unopened. The University of Kentucky has now offered a fresh $1 million prize to anyone who can fully read another by next June.

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