Herculaneum Scroll Read in Full Without Unrolling, Revealing an Ancient Ethics Text
A carbonized papyrus from the Villa of the Papyri has been deciphered from the outside in, offering scholars a rare intact reading of a text that had remained sealed for nearly two millennia. The scroll, PHerc. 1667, was read without being physically opened, a milestone that researchers say points toward a scalable way to study the villa’s fragile archive.
The Villa of the Papyri, long associated with Roman senator Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, is considered humanity’s sole surviving Greco-Roman library. Its roughly 1,800 scrolls, preserved by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, are too brittle to unfurl safely. That has made the Vesuvius Challenge, launched in 2023, one of the most closely watched experiments in digital archaeology. In October 2023, a 21-year-old student won $40,000 for identifying the scrolls’ first word. Later, three participants shared the challenge’s $700,000 grand prize after reading passages from a single scroll.
This latest breakthrough is different. It is the first time a team has deciphered an entire papyrus, according to the challenge’s announcement. The work relied on improved phase-contrast X-ray microtomography carried out in France and the U.K. along with software refinements developed after the 2024 grand prize. Brent Seales, founder of the Vesuvius Challenge, said the scan’s resolution was made possible by “a particle accelerator and a synchrotron,” and that the technical team has significantly advanced the software since last year.
The text itself is fragmentary, because PHerc. 1667 had already suffered damage from earlier attempts to unroll it in the 19th century and again in the 20th. Even so, scholars were able to identify a philosophical treatise on ethics, one that turns on human nature, impulse, and the moral progress of human beings. The final column mentions Aristocreon, a follower and relative of Chrysippus, suggesting a Stoic connection. The handwriting and references place the scroll between the second and third century B.C.E. making it one of the villa’s oldest known papyri and likely the work of someone other than Philodemus of Gadara.
Researchers also reported progress on PHerc. Paris 4 and identified PHerc. 139 as “On Gods, Book 8” by Philodemus. For scholars of ancient philosophy, the significance is not only that another scroll has been read, but that a damaged archive once thought nearly inaccessible is beginning to yield its contents at scale.
Herculaneum VesuviusChallenge AncientManuscripts Archaeology GreekPhilosophy DigitalHumanities
