An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time | Vesuvius Challenge

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We read an entire scroll — without ever opening it

PHerc. 1667, sealed since the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, has been virtually unwrapped and read from beginning to end.

June 25th, 2026

Read the preprint: Complete virtual unwrapping and reading of a rolled Herculaneum papyrus (PDF). The data is openly available at scrollprize.org/data, and the code on GitHub.

For almost 2,000 years, the carbonized library of Herculaneum has kept a cruel bargain: its scrolls survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, but only by becoming too fragile to open. To read one was to destroy it. Hundreds of rolls have therefore remained sealed, their contents preserved yet unreachable.

Today that changes. We have completely virtually unwrapped and read PHerc. 1667 — the scroll the Vesuvius Challenge community knows as Scroll 4 — without ever touching its pages. It is the first Herculaneum papyrus to be digitally unrolled and read in full, end to end, and made available for sustained scholarly study.

10 cm

© Vesuvius Challenge 2026

The complete writing surface of PHerc. 1667, virtually unwrapped — roughly 1.4 metres of papyrus and around twenty-two columns of Greek. Scroll sideways to pan; click to zoom. Download the high-resolution image.<br>From a sealed lump to a readable book​

PHerc. 1667 began as a blackened, rolled mass of carbonized papyrus. To read it, we never unrolled it physically. Instead, 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.

From object to text. The sealed, carbonized roll (top left); cross-sections through the X-ray scan revealing the spiraled sheet inside (top); and the unwrapped surface, where columns of Greek writing emerge as the ink signal is recovered (bottom).<br>Three sealed scrolls, three milestones​

The work reaches beyond a single scroll. Alongside the complete reading of PHerc. 1667, the research establishes a method that holds up under independent checks and scales to other rolls.

PHerc. 1667 — read in full​

PHerc. 1667 is what survives of a larger roll: earlier attempts to open it by hand — in the nineteenth century, and again in 1969 and the 1980s — destroyed its outer layers and left only the compact inner core, about 8 cm of an original height of 19–24 cm. From that surviving portion we have now recovered and read the text in full — the lower parts of some twenty-two columns, transcribed and reviewed by papyrologists. It is the first time the preserved text of a rolled Herculaneum scroll has been read continuously, end to end, rather than in isolated words or patches.

The recovered text is a philosophical treatise on ethics , and the evidence points to a Stoic work : it turns on human nature, impulse, and the moral progress of human beings, and its final preserved column names Aristocreon — nephew and disciple of the great Stoic Chrysippus — which, together with the language and themes of the text, places it in a Stoic context and dates it to the 2nd century BC.

Because the papyrus is damaged, the readings are fragmentary, with gaps where the surface is lost. Even so, several passages can be read clearly for the first time in two thousand years:

“…we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature…”

“Having…strained ourselves to the utmost through research and learning…possessing the same practical wisdom…”

“…such being the goods for us, even from the opposite evils there will be neither anything good — let alone beautiful — nor anything bad — let alone ugly — nor happiness…”

Translated from the Greek; the full column-by-column transcription is in the preprint.

PHerc. Paris 4 — ink made visible by higher resolution​

In a second scroll — PHerc. Paris 4, the scroll the Vesuvius Challenge community knows as Scroll 1 — a higher-resolution imaging technique makes the ink directly visible inside the scroll itself , in the three-dimensional X-ray data, for the first time. Segmented in 3D and projected back onto the unwrapped page, that ink matches the text read in the 2023 Grand Prize one-to-one — an independent confirmation, from better data, that the reading is real.

Ink made visible by higher resolution in PHerc. Paris 4 (Scroll 1). In a cross-section of the X-ray scan, the ink sits directly on the papyrus surface (left); it can then be segmented in three dimensions (red) and projected onto the unwrapped page.<br>PHerc. Paris 4: the 2023 Vesuvius Challenge Grand Prize reading (top) and the new 3D ink segmentation (bottom) — the same text, recovered one-to-one from better data.<br>PHerc. 139 — a title, and an author​

In a third scroll, PHerc. 139, we recover the scroll's title and author attribution : the work is identified as Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8 — a...