Scientists digitally unroll and read surviving portion of Herculaneum papyrus PHerc. 1667

Researchers say they have digitally unrolled and read the surviving portion of Herculaneum papyrus PHerc. 1667, marking what they describe as the first Herculaneum scroll to be fully read this way for sustained scholarly study without physically opening it.

The claim matters because the Herculaneum papyri are the carbonized remains of a Roman library buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE. The library, found at the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, is the only large-scale library to survive from classical antiquity. For centuries, scholars have faced a stark choice: leave the fragile rolls unread, or risk destroying them by trying to open them.

In a preprint posted to arXiv on June 27, the international team reported the “complete virtual unwrapping and reading” of PHerc. 1667 under explicit coverage and papyrological-review criteria. The paper, titled “Complete virtual unwrapping and reading of a rolled Herculaneum papyrus” (arXiv:2606.29085), is not yet peer-reviewed. The researchers and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, or ESRF, said the recovered readable portion amounts to nearly 1.5 meters of continuous text across about 20 columns. They are careful about what “complete” means: the claim applies to the surviving preserved portion of PHerc. 1667 that can be digitally traced and flattened, not to material lost in earlier physical opening attempts.

The result was also announced at a press event in Naples on June 25, with supporting material from ESRF and the Vesuvius Challenge, a broader effort bringing together researchers, papyrologists and imaging specialists. Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist involved in the work, said in the ESRF release: “This scroll was deemed completely unreadable when part of it was opened in the 1980s.”

The new work combines several methods rather than relying on artificial intelligence alone. Researchers scanned the scroll using high-resolution phase-contrast X-ray microtomography, a form of 3D X-ray imaging, on the BM18 beamline at ESRF. They then used improved computational methods to digitally trace, unwrap and flatten the tightly compressed layers, along with machine learning to detect and reconstruct ink.

That combination is what makes the PHerc. 1667 result a step beyond earlier demonstrations. Previous virtual-unwrapping work had revealed interior structures, isolated words and limited regions of text. This time, the team says it recovered a surviving roll segment continuously enough to support extended scholarly reading, moving the field closer to regular recovery of full texts rather than fragments.

The same announcement and preprint described two related advances. In PHerc. Paris 4, the team said an optimized scan protocol made ink directly visible in the tomographic volume, allowing 3D ink segmentation and an independent check on ink recovery. In PHerc. 139, the researchers said they recovered title and author-attribution evidence identifying the work as Philodemus’ “On Gods,” Book 8. ESRF said that finding is significant because it indicates the work extended to at least eight books.

Brent Seales, a computer scientist long associated with virtual-unwrapping research and the Vesuvius Challenge effort, said in the ESRF release: “For nearly two millennia, many of these texts have been physically preserved but intellectually inaccessible... Today — after years of interdisciplinary work combining advanced imaging, artificial intelligence (AI), academic research and an innovation contest — we are finally able to read them.”

More than 600 Herculaneum scrolls remain unopened, according to ESRF. That is why researchers are presenting PHerc. 1667 as more than another incremental reading: not as the end of the problem, and not as a settled result, but as an early demonstration that continuous, non-destructive recovery of texts from unopened rolls may be becoming practical. Wider scholarly verification will now depend on papyrological review of the readings and on whether the same approach can be repeated across more of the buried library.