GoKawiilWe read an entire scroll — without ever opening it
PHerc. 1667, sealed since the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, has been virtually unwrapped and read from beginning to end.
June 25th, 2026
Read the preprint: Complete virtual unwrapping and reading of a rolled Herculaneum papyrus (PDF). The data is openly available at scrollprize.org/data, and the code on GitHub.
For almost 2,000 years, the carbonized library of Herculaneum has kept a cruel bargain: its scrolls survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, but only by becoming too fragile to open. To read one was to destroy it. Hundreds of rolls have therefore remained sealed, their contents preserved yet unreachable.
Today that changes. We have completely virtually unwrapped and read PHerc. 1667 — the scroll the Vesuvius Challenge community knows as Scroll 4 — without ever touching its pages. It is the first Herculaneum papyrus to be digitally unrolled and read in full, end to end, and made available for sustained scholarly study.
10 cm © Vesuvius Challenge 2026 The complete writing surface of PHerc. 1667, virtually unwrapped — roughly 1.4 metres of papyrus and around twenty-two columns of Greek. Scroll sideways to pan; click to zoom. Download the high-resolution image.
PHerc. 1667 began as a blackened, rolled mass of carbonized papyrus. 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.
From object to text. The sealed, carbonized roll (top left); cross-sections through the X-ray scan revealing the spiraled sheet inside (top); and the unwrapped surface, where columns of Greek writing emerge as the ink signal is recovered (bottom).
The work reaches beyond a single scroll. Alongside the complete reading of PHerc. 1667, the research establishes a method that holds up under independent checks and scales to other rolls.
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