First Herculaneum scroll read end to end without unrolling it
PHerc. 1667 was virtually unwrapped and read in full from X-ray scans using learned ink detection: about 1.4 metres of papyrus across roughly 22 columns of Greek, identified as Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8.
- Model
- Community-developed ink-detection neural networks
- Field
- Archaeology
- Date
- 2026-06-25
- Human collaborators
- Brent Seales, Luke Farritor, Youssef Nader, Julian Schilliger
What was found
The Herculaneum scrolls were carbonised by the AD 79 eruption of Vesuvius and disintegrate if physically unrolled. The pipeline scans a scroll by X-ray tomography, traces the rolled sheet as a three-dimensional surface, flattens it, and runs a network that detects near-invisible carbon ink from sub-millimetre surface texture. Luke Farritor's model recovered the first word, πορφύρας ("purple"), in October 2023, and the 2023 Grand Prize for four passages of 140 characters was claimed in February 2024. In June 2026, PHerc. 1667 became the first scroll recovered continuously from beginning to end, and a title read in a related scroll established that Philodemus' On Gods ran to at least eight books.
Novelty check
Virtual unwrapping itself is older (Seales read the En-Gedi scroll in 2015), but that worked because its ink contained metal and showed up in X-ray. Herculaneum ink is carbon-based and nearly invisible to tomography, which is why the ink signal had to be learned from texture instead of density. No Herculaneum scroll had been read by any method before this programme.
Caveats and known objections
Readings are probabilistic reconstructions from a learned ink signal, not photographs of text: characters come with varying confidence and papyrologists supply conventional editorial restoration on top. The project's papyrology team reviews prize submissions, but that team is part of the challenge rather than an outside body, and no peer-reviewed critical edition of PHerc. 1667 had appeared when this entry was written, hence author-verified rather than independent. The attribution to Philodemus rests on a title read in a different scroll.
Nobody outside the lab has checked this yet.
Reading the primary source closely enough to say whether it supports the claim counts as a check, and you are credited on the entry.
Or on GitHub: submit a check challenge the grade send a correction or send a pull request
Flag this for triage
Signals order the review queue and nothing else. They are never published, and they never move a grade: that takes a citation.
Entry history (1 event)
- AddedEntered the registry graded Author verified and AI-assisted.
Entries are never deleted. A grade that does not hold up is downgraded on the record, with the reason beside it.
Graded author verified for verification and ai-assisted for autonomy. What these mean.
Cite this entry
whataifound.org. (2026). First Herculaneum scroll read end to end without unrolling it. whataifound.org: A Registry of AI Scientific and Mathematical Discoveries. https://whataifound.org/finding/2026-06-25-herculaneum-scroll-readBibTeX
@misc{whataifound-vesuviuschallenge-2026-read,
title = {First Herculaneum scroll read end to end without unrolling it},
author = {{whataifound.org}},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {whataifound.org: A Registry of AI Scientific and Mathematical Discoveries},
note = {Result by Vesuvius Challenge. Verification: Author verified. Autonomy: AI-assisted.},
url = {https://whataifound.org/finding/2026-06-25-herculaneum-scroll-read}
}