The scroll was first discovered in the 1750s but was too fragile to open. Using AI, scholars deciphered the full text and discovered a philosophical treaties on ethics and human progress.
An ancient scroll that survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD has finally revealed its secrets.
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Scientists were able to decipher the fragile scroll without unrolling it. Instead, they used artificial intelligence to uncover what ended up being, rather ironically, a philosophical treatise on ethics, human nature and moral progress.
PHerc. 1667, as the scroll was dubbed, belonged to a library of carbonised manuscripts first unearthed in the 1750s in the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum.
In total, some 1800s papyrus pieces were miraculously preserved under the ruins of one of the city’s most lavish villas, which was destroyed in the eruption. The fragments form the only complete surviving library from the Greco-Roman world.
But once this treasure came to light, a new challenge arose.
The scrolls had survived a devastating eruption and had spent hundreds of years buried under volcanic ash; they were now too fragile to open. To unroll them meant risking them dissolving into dust. So they remained meticulously sealed.
In 2023, the Vesuvius Challenge provided researchers and papyrus enthusiasts with a new incentive to decipher the scrolls by turning the puzzle into a global contest with cash prizes.
Contestants used computer vision and machine learning — a subset of AI — to conclusive results.
That very year, a 21-year-old computer science student received $40,000 after becoming “the first person in two millennia” to discover a word — “purple” — from an unopened scroll.
A team of scientists from various European and US universities eventually managed to decipher all surviving text from an entire scroll this month.
“PHerc. 1667 began as a blackened, rolled mass of carbonized papyrus,” the Vesuvius Challenged said last week. “To read it, we never unrolled it physically. Instead, we scanned it with high-resolution X-rays, reconstructed the wound sheet inside the volume, flattened it into a readable surface, and used machine learning to bring out the faint traces of ancient ink.”
Earlier attempts to open PHerc. 1667 damaged the papyrus and left only 8cm of an original height of 19–24cm. Researchers recovered the full text from that surviving portion to find “a philosophical treatise on ethics concerned with ethics, arts and human behavior.”
The scroll also names Aristocreon, a nephew and disciple of Stoic philosopher Chrysippus. Scholars said the text’s references, language and subject date it to the 2nd century BC and likely reflect Stoic doctrine.
“For nearly two millennia, many of these texts have been physically preserved but intellectually inaccessible,” said Vesuvius Challenge co-founder Brent Seales.
“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.”
This latest effort also led to the identification of a new book by Epicurean philosopher Philodemus from another scroll.
With just one manuscript deciphered, the Vesuvius Challenge is far from over. Hundreds more remain sealed, their secrets waiting to be discovered.
“Today, we are hearing voices that have been silent for 2,000 years,” Seales said. “For the first time, we are uncovering and reading them - but most importantly - we are beginning to understand them.
