Vesuvius Charcoal Turns into a New Stoic Text

A Herculaneum scroll known as PHerc. 1667—burned when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE—has been fully “virtually unwrapped and read” using X-ray micro-tomography and AI, without physically touching its pages. The text appears to be a Stoic treatise on ethics, n

For nearly two millennia. the story of Herculaneum’s papyri has sounded like a limitation: what was preserved by Vesuvius’s eruption still couldn’t be read. The charred material—most of it reduced to something like charcoal. further damaged by earlier attempts to physically unroll it—sat in the dark while scholars waited for tools capable of going further than the surface.

Now one scroll has crossed that threshold.

In the aftermath of the year 79 eruption, a cache of texts was inadvertently preserved in Herculaneum. Most of what’s become known as the Herculaneum papyri proved unreadable for a simple reason: the physical state of the scrolls resisted traditional handling. But that barrier is beginning to shift with X-ray micro-tomography and artificial intelligence.

In 2023. a first milestone arrived: researchers decoded the first word of one of these scrolls with support from prizes offered by the Vesuvius Challenge. This time, the project’s website says PHerc. 1667—known within the Vesuvius Challenge community as Scroll 4—has been completely virtually unwrapped and read without ever touching its pages.

What at first appears to be little more than a big hunk of charcoal. and what was further damaged by several physical unrolling attempts in less technologically advanced times. turns out to be more than a relic. The decoded text is described as “a philosophical treatise on ethics,” with evidence pointing to a Stoic work. The focus is said to “turn[] on human nature, impulse, and the moral progress of human beings.”.

The spell of recognition is in the details. The scroll’s last preserved column drops the name Aristocreon, described as “nephew and disciple of the great Stoic Chrysippus,” and that naming suggests the text dates to the second century BC.

PHerc. 1667 is also framed as a technical and scholarly turning point: it is “the first Herculaneum papyrus to be digitally unrolled and read in full, end to end, and made available for sustained scholarly study.”

The effort is collective and ongoing. Another text already in the pipeline is PHerc. 139. identified as “Philodemus. On Gods. Book 8 — a treatise by the Epicurean philosopher whose works fill so much of this library.” That matters because it hints at how the library’s owner—and the intellectual atmosphere around it—was not devoted to a single school.

Stoicism and Epicureanism. after all. stood as rival philosophies. but they also held to a shared human impulse: trying to explain how to live. Ancient Stoics and Epicureans carried on lively debate about how to live, and some of those arguments were written down. The presence of Stoic and Epicurean works within the same library suggests an owner—possibly the father-in-law of Julius Caesar—kept an interest in both.

Now the promise is not just reading a text. but picking up an argument that has been frozen in ash and silence since the eruption. If the needed technologies keep advancing. the future implied by these breakthroughs is not simply more information—it’s the chance to reunite philosophy with its original exchange.

For those wanting to follow the work itself, the project points to more on the decoding of the papyrus here and here.

Herculaneum papyri Mount Vesuvius PHerc. 1667 Stoicism Chrysippus Aristocreon Vesuvius Challenge X-ray micro-tomography AI decoding Philodemus Epicureanism ancient philosophy