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Entire Herculaneum Scroll Read for the First Time — AI Unlocks 2,000-Year-Old Stoic Text
The Vesuvius Challenge team has virtually unwrapped and read PHerc. 1667 end-to-end — the first complete reading of a Herculaneum scroll in history — revealing a lost Stoic treatise on ethics sealed since 79 AD.
After nearly 2,000 years sealed in carbonized silence, an entire Herculaneum scroll has been read from beginning to end — without ever being opened.
The Vesuvius Challenge team announced on June 25 that PHerc. 1667, a scroll buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, has been completely virtually unwrapped and its text recovered. Using high-resolution phase-contrast X-ray microtomography at the ESRF's BM18 beamline in Grenoble, France, researchers scanned the blackened, rolled mass of carbonized papyrus, reconstructed the wound sheet inside, flattened it into a readable surface, and deployed machine learning to detect ink nearly indistinguishable from the carbonized papyrus beneath it.
The result: roughly 1.4 metres of papyrus and approximately twenty-two columns of Greek text — a philosophical treatise on ethics that papyrologists identify as a Stoic work from the 2nd century BC. The text revolves around human nature, impulse (hormē), and moral progress, and its final preserved column names Aristocreon — nephew and disciple of the great Stoic philosopher Chrysippus. Translated passages include lines unseen for two millennia: "…we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature…"
A second scroll, PHerc. 139, yielded its title — Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8 — confirming for the first time that the Epicurean philosopher's work extended to at least eight books. More than 600 Herculaneum scrolls remain unopened. All data, code, and transcriptions have been released openly at scrollprize.org.
Sources: Vesuvius Challenge, ESRF
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