Virtually Unwrapping the Herculaneum Scrolls: PHerc. 1667 Read for the First Time

Researchers have successfully virtually unwrapped and read an entire carbonized papyrus scroll from Herculaneum (PHerc. 1667) without physically opening it. This breakthrough marks the first time a rolled Herculaneum papyrus has been read continuously from end to end, providing a scalable method for recovering lost ancient texts.

The Recovery of PHerc. 1667

PHerc. 1667 (known to the Vesuvius Challenge community as Scroll 4) has been sealed since the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Due to the carbonization process, the scrolls became too fragile to physically unroll without destroying them.

Content and Significance

The recovered text is a philosophical treatise on ethics, identified as a Stoic work from the 2nd century BC. The text focuses on human nature, impulse, and moral progress. A key identifier was the mention of Aristocreon, the nephew and disciple of the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus.

Despite fragmentary gaps caused by physical damage to the papyrus, several passages have been recovered, including:

"…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…"

Physical State of the Scroll

PHerc. 1667 is the remaining inner core of a larger roll. Previous physical unrolling attempts in the 19th century, 1969, and the 1980s destroyed the outer layers, leaving only a compact core approximately 8 cm in height (down from an original height of 19–24 cm). The team recovered the lower parts of approximately twenty-two columns of Greek text.

Technical Methodology: From Scan to Text

The process of reading the scroll involves a pipeline of high-resolution imaging and computational reconstruction.

Imaging with Synchrotron X-rays

The team used high-resolution phase-contrast X-ray microtomography at the BM18 beamline of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble. This instrument allows the team to resolve the wafer-thin, densely packed layers of the carbonized papyrus.

Computational Reconstruction

Once the scans are acquired, the following steps are taken:

Geometry Reconstruction: The team reconstructs the wound sheet's geometry inside the volume.
Surface Flattening: The wound sheet is traced and flattened into a readable 2D surface.
Ink Detection: Machine learning models are trained to detect faint traces of ancient ink that are nearly indistinguishable from the carbonized papyrus.
Papyrological Review: The resulting images are transcribed and reviewed by expert papyrologists.

Validation and Other Recoveries

The research team validated their methods using other scrolls to demonstrate the scalability of the approach.

PHerc. Paris 4 (Scroll 1)

In PHerc. Paris 4, higher-resolution imaging made the ink directly visible in the 3D X-ray data. When projected onto the unwrapped page, this ink matched the 2023 Grand Prize reading one-to-one, providing independent confirmation that the machine learning detections are accurate.

PHerc. 139

In PHerc. 139, the team recovered the scroll's title and author attribution, identifying the work as On Gods, Book 8 by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus. This demonstrates the ability to recover metadata (titles and authors) from closed scrolls before the main body of the text is analyzed.

Open Science and the Vesuvius Challenge

This project is led by Professor Brent Seales of EduceLab and was expanded through the Vesuvius Challenge, a public, donation-funded effort co-founded with Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross.

Community-Driven Research

Many of the researchers on the current team were originally contestants in the open competition. The project operates on a principle of open science, with tomographic data, reconstructed surfaces, and transcriptions released under a Creative Commons license at scrollprize.org/data and code available on GitHub via the ScrollPrize/villa repository.

Future Outlook

With PHerc. 1667 read in full, the methodology is now established as a scalable process. Hundreds of other sealed scrolls from the Herculaneum library remain, offering the potential to recover an entire library of ancient philosophy, poetry, and prose.