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

herculaneumvesuvius-challengevirtual-unwrappingai-mlarchaeologydigital-humanitiesmanuscripts

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. The same announcement presents two further scrolls as separate milestones rather than as second full readings: in PHerc. Paris 4 (the community's "Scroll 1") a higher-resolution imaging technique made the ink directly visible inside the scroll, matching the text read for the 2023 Grand Prize; in PHerc. 139 the title and author were recovered — Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8 (the promotion wording had "two further scrolls were said to be partially identified by the same method"; corrected against the page 2026-09-11).

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.