For almost 2,000 years, the carbonized Herculaneum scrolls have been unreadable — too fragile to unroll without destroying them. On June 25, 2026, the Vesuvius Challenge announced it had virtually unwrapped and read an entire one, PHerc. 1667, from start to finish.
The scroll was never touched. A pipeline of high-resolution CT scanning plus machine-learning models that detect faint ink traces reconstructed the rolled papyrus layer by layer and rendered the text. The team published a preprint, and released the data and code openly.
We read an entire scroll — without ever opening it.
It's a leap from October 2023, when the same effort recovered just the first word. Reading a full text end to end turns a proof of concept into a method — and there are hundreds more scrolls waiting.
Source: Vesuvius Challenge