Archaeology & History
Entire Herculaneum Scroll Deciphered by A.I. for the First Time
A team working as part of the Vesuvius Challenge deciphered the scroll without ever unraveling it.
A team working as part of the Vesuvius Challenge deciphered the scroll without ever unraveling it.
Vittoria Benzine ShareShare This Article
After centuries, papyrologists have finally translated a scroll immortalized by Mount Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago. The so-called PHerc. 1667 scroll surfaced when the Villa of the Papyri emerged at Herculaneum, ten miles from Pompeii, in the 1750s. Using previously unimaginable technology, a team associated with the University of Kentucky’s Vesuvius Challenge read PHerc. 1667—without even opening it.
Historians believe the Villa of the Papyri, which opened to the public in 2003, belonged to Roman senator Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus. It remains humanity’s sole surviving Greco-Roman library. Alas, its 1,800 carbonized scrolls are too fragile to unfurl.
Since 2023, the Vesuvius Challenge has offered prizes enticing computer scientists to help solve the conundrum. In October 2023, a 21-year-old student won $40,000 for decoding the scrolls’ first word. Months later, three more won the Vesuvius Challenge’s $700,000 grand prize by reading several passages from a single scroll. Efforts continue. Just last February, new words emerged.
This June, however, marked the first time crews deciphered an entire papyrus—a monumental achievement heralding the arrival of a scalable translation method.
Academics have historically mishandled PHerc. 1667. They’ve attempted to unroll the artifact three times between the 1800s and 1980s, as the Vesuvius Challenge noted in its announcement. Each instance damaged the scroll’s outer layers.
Over email, Vesuvius Challenge founder Brent Seales said that improved phase-contrast X-ray microtomography conducted in France and the U.K. empowered this latest discovery. “We have a very high resolution because of the instrument we used to scan it, which is a particle accelerator and a synchrotron,” Seales wrote. “The Vesuvius Challenge technical team has significantly improved the software since the 2024 Vesuvius Challenge grand prize.”
Although PHerc. 1667 has been read in its entirety, the 0.78-inch-thick artifact can only offer fragments from the lower three inches of its original 7.5-to-9.5-inch-tall columns, given its previous damage. There, experts revealed “a philosophical treatise on ethics,” per this week’s announcement, which “turns on human nature, impulse, and the moral progress of human beings.” The last of the scroll’s 22 columns mentions Aristocreon, follower and relative of the elusive Stoic Chrysippus.
The scroll’s handwriting and references, meanwhile, place it between the second and third century B.C.E., rendering it one of the villa’s oldest scrolls. This date indicates authorship by someone other than Philodemus of Gadara—the villa’s most prominent writer. Team member Alessia Lavorante noted in press materials that the villa also features writers like Epicurus and Chrysippus. “So, it could be one of them,” she surmised, “or someone entirely new.”
“If this text had been found in Egypt or anywhere else, it would probably have been classified straight away as a Stoic text,” teammate Federica Nicolard added. “The fact that it comes from a collection that is almost entirely Epicurean makes us more cautious.”
Two further bombshells accompanied this latest find. Efforts translating PHerc. Paris 4, have yielded promising results in imaging ink. Researchers have also assigned PHerc. 139 a title and author—On Gods, Book 8, by Philodemus.
The Vesuvius Challenge will apply its findings to further scrolls, as it works to bring the Villa of the Papyri to scholars worldwide.