AI Reads Inside a Charred Herculaneum Scroll for the First Time in 2,000 Years

For the first time in nearly two thousand years, scholars have read text from inside a sealed, charred Herculaneum scroll without unrolling it. The breakthrough, announced on 7 February 2025 by the University of Oxford, focused on a scroll known as PHerc. 172, one of three held at the Bodleian Libraries and donated in the early 19th century by Ferdinand IV, King of Naples and Sicily.

The scroll was among hundreds carbonized when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, burying the Roman town of Herculaneum. The intense heat turned the papyri into brittle lumps that crumble if anyone tries to open them physically. To read it safely, the scroll was scanned at the Diamond Light Source synchrotron in Harwell in July 2024, producing a detailed three-dimensional X-ray image of its tightly wound layers.

“The breakthrough, announced on 7 February 2025 by the University of Oxford, focused on a scroll known as PHerc.”

Researchers connected to the Vesuvius Challenge, an open competition founded in 2023 by Brent Seales, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross, then applied machine learning to detect traces of ancient ink within the scan. The models do not understand language or recognize characters; they simply flag where ink is likely present, allowing scholars to map and read the text. The first translated word was the ancient Greek term for disgust, which appears more than once in the visible columns.

The visible portion already shows about 26 lines of text per column, more recoverable writing than any previously scanned Herculaneum scroll. Researchers have not yet identified the author or full subject of PHerc. 172, but the early columns suggest a philosophical work, in keeping with other texts recovered from the same library, many associated with Epicurean philosophy.

The Herculaneum papyri represent the only large library to survive from the classical world. The breakthrough builds on years of incremental progress through the Vesuvius Challenge, which has rewarded teams, including student researchers, for advancing the imaging and decoding pipeline. Scholars hope the technique will eventually unlock hundreds of texts on philosophy, literature, and science that have been unreadable for two millennia. If even a fraction can be recovered, it could dramatically expand the surviving corpus of ancient writing and reshape what we know of classical thought, offering a rare second chance to read voices silenced by a single catastrophic day in 79 AD.