Lost books by ancient philosophers recovered from ‘unreadable’ scrolls

AI recovered – Researchers working on the Vesuvius Challenge have used AI to digitally unwrap a Herculaneum papyrus scroll—previously deemed impossible to read. The breakthrough has revealed 1.5 metres of text across 22 columns from a 2-centimetre-wide core, including passag

A scroll that looked like nothing more than char—collected from the buried world of Herculaneum and treated like a near-lost cause—has finally started to talk.

Researchers have now used advanced imaging and AI to extract the entire surviving text from a carbonised papyrus scorched by the AD 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius. without unrolling it. The achievement comes from super-high-resolution 3D scans of the scroll core and a computational approach that “digitally unwraps” the layers—an option scholars long avoided because physically handling these brittle rolls could destroy what remains of the ink.

The scrolls come from the library of Herculaneum, buried along with Pompeii nearly 2000 years ago. When the library was discovered in 1752, scholars began trying to read the carbonised texts that resemble lumps of charcoal. But unwrapping them risked their destruction, and to human eyes the ink is mostly indistinguishable from the charred papyri.

Since 2023. the Vesuvius Challenge project has used particle accelerators to scan dozens of scrolls and then shared the scans with an online community. People there helped write AI software designed to digitally unwrap the scrolls and detect ink. With the approach, book titles, authors and short passages became readable.

Now the team has gone further, uncovering 1.5 metres of text written across 22 columns from a 2-centimetre-wide scroll core whose outer layers were stripped off by scholars through the centuries in an effort to read it.

Federica Nicolardi of the University of Naples Federico II in Italy described how this specific scroll had resisted every earlier effort: “We find records of several attempts to open it… but they couldn’t read anything. There are some fragments surviving from the last attempt to physically open it. but you can really see just a couple of letters. So virtual unwrapping was able to change the history of this papyrus.”.

The scroll has been described by Vesuvius Challenge co-founder Brent Seales of the University of Kentucky as an “impossible scroll. ” one of hundreds that survived the assaults of early papyrologists. who could only read the “easier ones.” Longer sections of these impossible scrolls are becoming readable as the project combines higher-resolution imaging—down to 2 micrometres—with more scan data to train the team’s data-hungry AI algorithms.

Seales said the current AI models are adapted to individual scrolls because of differences such as the inks used. He also pointed toward a future where the system could handle any scroll once trained on enough of the collection: “That’s where we are with large language models… But that’s because they’ve trained those models repeatedly on the entire internet. and we’re not there yet with scrolls.”.

The newly unwrapped text isn’t just legible—it appears to speak with philosophical purpose. Nicolardi said the scroll’s contents include references to the Stoic doctrine, alongside themes of ethics, art and human nature. She added that the script is typical of scripts from the 2nd century BC. and that it mentions the nephew of the Greek Stoic philosopher Chrysippus—making Chrysippus “the most natural candidate for authorship.”.

Chrysippus is widely regarded as one of the architects of Stoicism, yet almost all of his work has been lost. Classicist Thomas Coward of the University of Bristol in the UK said scholars largely know his ideas through other writers. often critical authors. “To have access to a source text rather than quotes and summaries. which can be modified or interpreted by other writers. is very important. ” Coward said. likening a discovery like this to uncovering lost works by Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein that were only referenced by other scientists.

The story doesn’t stop at one philosopher. The unwrapping work also identified another readable Herculaneum scroll as On Gods, Book 8 by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus. That finding extends Philodemus’s previously known work On Gods, Book 1, to at least an eight-book series.

Philodemus’s connection to the Herculaneum library is tied to its presumed patron: his works were sponsored by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus. The new scroll context also includes the fact that one of Chrysippus’s critics was Philodemus. a less widely known 1st-century Epicurean philosopher.

For Nicholas Freer at the University of Newcastle in the UK, these results are more than a one-off breakthrough. He said the techniques could “radically transform” understanding of ancient worlds, in part because hundreds of scrolls still remain unopened. “What we’re seeing now isn’t just a single, spectacular breakthrough. We’re witnessing the beginning of what could be a decades-long process of recovery,” Freer said.

Seales, who has pioneered digital unwrapping techniques for decades, framed the moment as a turning point. For years, the field has wrestled with whether the technology would work at all. These discoveries shift attention toward what can finally be learned. “What people are going to care about now is: whose name actually appears. how old is the scroll and what does it say about philosophy?” he said. “So we’re working ourselves out of a job, but it’s all about restoring the lost voices.”.

If he has any regret, it is not about the science—it is about timing. Seales said so many scrolls were destroyed before he had a chance to read them. “The ones they pulled from the ground… the original 1752 scrolls. I believe we would be reading them instantly 1782399012 because they were the easiest ones to read. ” he said.

Vesuvius Challenge Herculaneum scrolls digital unwrapping particle accelerators AI imaging Stoicism Chrysippus Philodemus ancient philosophy Mount Vesuvius