Roman scrolls emerge as Vesuvius damage unraveled digitally

A team behind the Vesuvius Challenge has digitally unrolled ancient Roman scrolls from Herculaneum—buried under Mount Vesuvius lava in 79 AD—so fully that one text can be read end to end for the first time. Using synchrotron-based scanning and the Volume Carto

The scroll looked like nothing a reader could ever love.

PHerc 172—charred and fragile to the point of looking like delicate wood—sat in the ruined world left behind by Mount Vesuvius. It was one of the documents obliterated when lava and catastrophe swallowed Herculaneum, the Roman town buried in 79 AD. At least 1. 500 people died in the eruption that also devastated Pompeii. yet volcanic ash preserved what human hands never could: burnt layers of writing inside the villa now known as the Villa dei Papiri. or Villa of the Papyrus.

For nearly 2,000 years, those scrolls couldn’t be opened. Now, at a press conference, Nat Friedman—one of the Vesuvius Challenge’s main backers and former CEO of GitHub—unveiled digitally unrolled scrolls from Herculaneum. One of them, called PHerc 1667, can be read in its entirety.

“We were not only able to completely unroll this scroll, from end to end, but we were able to extract nearly all the text, and make it legible,” Friedman said.

The work depends on technology designed for a basic problem: how do you read a book you can’t open?. Brent Seales, a professor at the University of Kentucky, has spent his career trying to answer that question. This week’s unveiling marked a pinnacle for that effort. with Seales and a large network of volunteers and scientists developing ways to “see inside” books and scrolls without destroying them.

The digitally unwrapped PHerc 1667 was produced using a technique pioneered by Seales called Volume Cartographer. The method starts with scans of a 3D manuscript. layer by layer. then effectively flattens those layers into 2D images that can be read. The scanning itself uses synchrotron scanners—massive particle accelerators that beam high-power x-rays at the object. revealing inner layers down to the atomic level.

Seales described the scaling challenge as something that had to be solved before the technology could move beyond a promising prototype. “AI has been a huge accelerator. and a huge accelerant. because the technique itself. we needed a breakthrough to amplify the way we could detect the ink inside these scans. ” he said. “To go to scale. we needed a way to build a label set—you know. here’s ink. here’s not ink—much more effectively than doing things by hand.”.

He added that AI coding agents let the team try new techniques much faster than if they had to write all the code themselves.

The achievement lands on a timeline shaped by both history and iteration. The Vesuvius Challenge began accelerating Seales’s work roughly two decades into his research. It also built momentum by organizing the kind of distributed effort that many traditional academic funding models don’t easily reward.

Seales said he understood the risk. He also said he felt confident after Friedman and the Challenge’s co-founder, Daniel Gross, approached him. Gross is a tech investor who has led AI development at Apple.

“I may not have taken that risk earlier in my career, but at the point where I’m at now, I felt that this was absolutely a really fun thing to try, and you know, it ended up being a home run,” Seales said. “I think it can be a pattern for others who are in the right place in the right moment.”

The same logic of scale is visible in the project’s progress so far. Seales and the Vesuvius Challenge have scanned 45 scrolls. Already. papyrologists are deciphering new texts that indicate other possible authors in the Herculaneum collection. including one of the leaders of the Stoic philosophy school.

The scrolls come from a context that makes every newly readable line feel personal—even if the language is ancient. Some 400 papyrus scrolls remain intact, Seales said. Now, for the first time, he and the Challenge can read them.

“To restore these lost voices, I feel like I myself am finding mine,” Seales said.

That sense of voice—lost, preserved, and then finally reachable—was echoed in the day’s other reveal. Among the digitally unrolled scrolls unveiled on Thursday was a previously unknown text by Philodemus, a leading Epicurean philosopher, called “On the Gods, Booke Eight.”

The discovery carries its own jolt for scholarship: scholars had no idea that Philodemus had written any volumes “On the Gods,” let alone eight of them.

Papyrologist Federica Nicolardi said at the same event that the team has already identified a number of intriguing passages. including some on the nature of deities and providence. “These are no longer anonymous ancient books,” she said. “Imagine being able to recover the titles of hundreds of still unopened scrolls. It would be like reconstructing the catalogue of an ancient library.”.

Before Thursday’s unveiling, the Challenge had already demonstrated that progress was possible. About two years ago. the Vesuvius Challenge first announced that three volunteers—Luke Farritor. Youssef Nader. and Julian Schilliger—had managed to clearly pick out the ink on one of the Herculaneum scrolls’ layers of papyrus. making it legible by papyrologists for the first time. That manuscript, a treatise of Epicurean philosophy also likely written by Philodemus, was entirely unknown to scholars before the Challenge.

There’s a quiet tension running through all of it: the work is advanced and high-tech, but it is still rooted in fragile, human-sized moments—careful layers, careful scans, and the willingness to keep trying when the object resists you.

Seales described how the competition may seem unfamiliar to academics who rely on more conventional funding structures. Yet he framed it as a moment when his own decades-long focus finally found the structure it needed.

He also spoke about what’s next, and why he’s already thinking beyond antiquity. For him, this isn’t just a victory lap over Vesuvius. He said he wants to apply the technology to collections of photographic negatives from the birth of photography. such as those by Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge’s 1878 “The Horse in Motion” is considered the first example of using photography to study a body in motion.

Those negatives are often stored inside cans, Seales said. They’re also too fragile to unroll without destroying them. His hope is that the same approach that can read charred papyrus layers might also recover images trapped inside physical archives.

“I think we never understand origins very well, right? Like, what were these guys really photographing on a bad day? What did they think they were just going to throw away? Sometimes that’s the most interesting stuff.”

Seales sounded, in the end, almost relieved—like he’d reached a finish line and didn’t want to pretend it felt routine.

“There’s this deep-seated feeling of completion that I haven’t had in a really long time, because Vesuvius has been looming over my life for two decades,” he said.

He also described how he had expected to change the field he entered. only to find that his work was reshaping it instead. “We always go into our fields thinking that the field we go into is really the one we’re going to change. right?. But it turns out I’m changing the field of classical philology and papyrology. and I’m not any of those things. ” Seales said. “I’ve created a field of people who are like me … I’ve created a community. and we’re going to share this experience. so that feels really great.”.

Vesuvius Challenge Herculaneum scrolls Volume Cartographer Brent Seales synchrotron scanning PHerc 1667 PHerc 172 Philodemus Villa dei Papiri digital unrolling AI in archaeology