In June 2026, PHerc. 1667 became the first carbonized Herculaneum scroll read end-to-end without being physically unrolled

On 25 June 2026, the Vesuvius Challenge announced that PHerc. 1667 — a carbonized Herculaneum papyrus of roughly 1.4 m and about 22 columns of Greek — had been read from beginning to end without ever being physically opened, which the project describes as the first time a complete scroll has been recovered this way. The scroll was scanned by high-resolution X-ray microtomography at the ESRF synchrotron, its wound sheet reconstructed and digitally flattened, and its text made legible by machine-learning ink-detection models: "we never unrolled it physically... we scanned it with high-resolution X-rays, reconstructed the wound sheet inside the volume, flattened it into a readable surface, and used machine learning to bring out the faint traces of ancient ink." The recovered text is reported as a 2nd-century BC Stoic ethics treatise on moral progress that references Aristocreon, the nephew of Chrysippus; two further scrolls were said to be partially identified by the same method.

The event is the payoff of the virtual-unwrapping research program begun by Brent Seales, and it extends a longer lineage of recovering text the eye cannot see — the same underlying problem attacked by multispectral imaging of erased palimpsests. Mechanically it is an inference task: a trained model run over a 3-D volume to classify ink versus blank papyrus. It also connects to the vault's document-technology thread about who — or what — can still read a format the naked eye has lost, alongside notes like claim-internet-archive-2016-stopped-generating-djvu.