On June 25 2026, researchers with the Vesuvius Challenge announced that they had read an entire sealed Herculaneum scroll from beginning to end without ever opening it. The scroll, catalogued as PHerc. 1667, had stayed shut since Mount Vesuvius buried the Roman town of Herculaneum in 79 AD. It is the first carbonized Herculaneum roll to be virtually unwrapped and read continuously, one column after another, rather than in scattered words and isolated patches. The team revealed the result at the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli in Naples, with Vesuvius visible in the distance, and it delivers on a goal that many scholars long considered impossible.

How did anyone read a scroll that cannot be opened?

Nobody unrolled it, because unrolling it would destroy it. The scroll was scanned using high resolution phase contrast microtomography on the BM18 beamline at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, an instrument able to resolve the wafer thin, densely packed layers inside a crushed papyrus roll. Machine learning models then traced the buried sheet through the scan and picked out the faint carbon ink, which sits at almost the same density as the burned papyrus it was written on. Earlier attempts to open PHerc. 1667 by hand, in the nineteenth century and again in 1969 and the 1980s, ripped away its outer layers and left only a fragment of the original. What survived has been recovered as readable Greek text, proving the digital approach can do what human hands never could.

What does the recovered text actually say?

The contents are Greek philosophy, which fits the library they came from. The Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum held a vast collection dominated by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus, and the new work pulled his fingerprints out of more than one roll. In a separate scroll, PHerc. 139, the team read the title and author line directly, identifying it as Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8. That single line is a real discovery, because it establishes that On Gods ran to at least eight books when scholars previously knew only the first. The researchers also presented dozens of fresh columns of philosophical text, including material attributed to Philodemus on vice and human behavior, the kind of writing that had been sealed in darkness for nearly two thousand years.

Why does a burned philosophy scroll matter so much?

Because hundreds more sealed scrolls are sitting in the same library, and this is the proof that they can be read. The carbonized rolls of Herculaneum are the only intact library to survive from the ancient world, preserved precisely because the eruption cooked them into fragile lumps of carbon. Every other ancient text we have was copied and recopied by hand across centuries, but these are originals, untouched since 79 AD. If the pipeline that read PHerc. 1667 can scale to the rest of the collection, it could meaningfully expand the surviving body of classical literature, recovering works of philosophy, history, and science that no modern person has ever read.

What comes next for the Vesuvius Challenge?

The project is throwing money and open tools at the next stage. The Vesuvius Challenge, launched in 2023 by computer scientist Brent Seales of the University of Kentucky alongside technology investors Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, has already awarded more than 1.8 million dollars in prizes for progress on the scrolls. The team announced that it would place all of its data, code, and models online and offer a fresh one million dollar prize to the first person or group that reads any other scroll in full. The bet is simple. Open the problem to the entire world, reward the breakthroughs, and let a global community of engineers and papyrologists finish unrolling a library that has kept its secrets since the Roman Empire.

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