For nearly two millennia, a small papyrus scroll sat in a Naples library, blackened and compressed to less than an inch in diameter, its contents completely unreadable. Recovered from the ruins of Herculaneum after Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 C.E., it had survived the disaster only to be badly damaged by the scholars who tried to open it centuries later.
Now, using CT-style imaging and artificial intelligence, researchers have recovered all surviving text from the scroll for the first time, revealing a 2,000-year-old philosophical treatise on reason, virtue, and the limits of human knowledge.
The decipherment, presented at a conference in Naples on June 25, 2026 and reported National Geographic, marks the first time an entire Herculaneum scroll has been read from what survives of it. The nearly five-foot-long segment contains roughly 20 columns of ancient Greek, accessible for the first time since the first century B.C.E.
A Scroll Damaged by the People Trying to Read It
The Herculaneum scrolls are the only known library to survive from Greco-Roman antiquity. Buried under 60 feet of volcanic debris, the roughly 1,800 papyrus scrolls were preserved by the very material that made them nearly impossible to access. Rather than burning, they baked into brittle, carbonized lumps that crumbled at the slightest touch.
When archaeologists unearthed the Villa of the Papyri in the 1750s, generations of scholars made the problem worse. Early attempts involved cutting scrolls in half and scraping away layers. In the 1960s and 1980s, researchers applied gelatin and acetic acid to the scroll now catalogued as PHerc. 1667, hoping to soften it enough to read. More than half the scroll was destroyed in the process. Its diameter shrank from 1.9 inches to less than 0.8 inches.
“What survives today is only a small portion of the original scroll,” said Federica Nicolardi, the lead papyrologist for the Vesuvius Challenge, at the Naples press conference. “Although the title and the upper portion of the text have been lost, we can now follow the author’s argument across consecutive lines and columns.”
Virtual Unwrapping Extracts Ink From Carbonized Papyrus
The technique behind these decipherments was developed by Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky who has been working on the problem since the early 2000s. His method uses x-ray tomography, similar to a hospital CT scan, to capture three-dimensional images of a scroll’s internal layers. Software then segments and flattens those layers so that text can be read. Because ink on carbonized papyrus appears as a faint texture in scans rather than a clear contrast, Seales also built an AI tool designed specifically to detect those ink signatures.
In 2023, Seales partnered with two Silicon Valley investors to launch the Vesuvius Challenge, a public competition that has awarded more than $1.8 million in prizes for contributions to scroll decipherment. Milestones came quickly: a single readable word in 2023, then 2,000 Greek characters from one scroll, then a confirmed title.
The full recovery of PHerc. 1667’s surviving text is the project’s most complete result yet. “The tech actually does look like magic, but it’s not,” Seales said at the press conference. “It’s the remarkable means to a higher calling: the restoration of lost voices from the ancient world.”
The Scroll’s Stoic Argument and What It Reveals
The content of PHerc. 1667 reflects core ideas of Stoicism, a philosophical tradition that centers reason and virtue as the foundations of a good life. The surviving passages warn against letting passion override reason and advocate for phronesis, a Greek term for practical wisdom.
The text also probes the boundaries of knowledge directly: “We will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature.” Papyrologist Claudio Vergara interprets this as a reference to human rationality and an innate inclination toward goodness, ideas central to Stoic thought.
The scroll also mentions Aristocreon, the nephew of Chrysippus, a foundational Stoic philosopher whose writings survive only through references in other works. Whether Chrysippus himself authored PHerc. 1667 remains uncertain, but scholars find the possibility significant.
“To have access to a source text rather than quotes and summaries, which can be modified or interpreted by other writers, is very important,” Thomas Coward, a classicist at the University of Bristol not involved with the project, told New Scientist.
Nicolardi also observed that the handwriting is more archaic than other scrolls in the collection, with more angular and varied letterforms, suggesting the papyrus dates to the second or possibly third century B.C.E. That would place it among the oldest manuscripts from Roman antiquity ever recovered.
Additional Scrolls Deciphered as the Project Scales
Beyond PHerc. 1667, the team confirmed a title in a second scroll: Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8. Scholars had previously known only of Books 1 and possibly 3 in that series.
The discovery of Book 8 suggests the work extended further than previously documented, raising the possibility that additional volumes remain among the unread scrolls. A third scroll, PHerc. 172, yielded more than 70 columns of text from Philodemus’ On Vices, a significant gain for a manuscript that was entirely unreadable before virtual unwrapping.
The Vesuvius Challenge is now offering a $1 million prize to the first team to fully decipher another complete scroll by this time next year, with a requirement that all methods be shared publicly so other researchers can build on them. Herculaneum itself has never been fully excavated, and archaeologists believe more scrolls may still be buried beneath the site.