Overview
- A team led by the Vesuvius Challenge and University of Kentucky researchers used very large micro‑CT scans and AI to virtually unwrap and extract the surviving text of PHerc.1667 without ever touching its layers.
- The pipeline produced about 1.5 metres of continuous Greek text across roughly 20 columns and the project team released scan data, reconstructed surfaces and code for scholarly use.
- Papyrologists report the text reads as a Stoic ethical treatise that names Aristocreon, which suggests a link to the Stoic tradition and a likely date in the second or possibly third century BCE.
- The same methods identified PHerc.139 as Philodemus' On Gods, Book 8 and recovered more than 70 columns from PHerc.172, expanding known content from the Herculaneum library.
- Researchers and funders have offered a $1 million prize to read another scroll within a year and they say the next steps are careful transcription, peer review and scaling imaging and computation to tackle the hundreds of unread rolls remaining.