Overview
- An international team announced on Wednesday that it digitally unrolled and read PHerc. 1667, a carbonized papyrus from Herculaneum, without physically opening the fragile scroll.
- The team used high‑resolution synchrotron X‑ray scans at Grenoble, software that flattens thousands of circular cross‑section images into a continuous digital strip, and an AI trained to detect the texture of carbon‑based ink invisible to standard X‑rays.
- The recovered manuscript is about 1.5 metres long across roughly 20 columns and contains a Stoic ethical treatise that offers new readings linking parts of the text to Philodemus of Gadara.
- The result grew out of the Vesuvius Challenge, which released open 3D scans and offered prize funding backed by Nat Friedman, and organizers have announced further prizes and plans to automate the method for other unread rolls in late 2026 and 2027.
- Beyond adding a specific Stoic work to the Herculaneum library, the non‑invasive workflow protects the originals and could let scholars recover many otherwise lost classical texts while reducing the risk of damage from physical unrolling.