Vesuvius Challenge Breakthrough Reveals New Text in Herculaneum Scrolls
A project built around machine learning and high-energy imaging has pushed one of classical scholarship’s most stubborn problems into new territory. The University of Kentucky announced a “historic breakthrough” last week in its Vesuvius Challenge, saying researchers have virtually unwrapped a carbonized scroll from Herculaneum and recovered substantial text from another held in Oxford.
The scrolls come from the Villa of the Papyri, the ancient library preserved when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE. Buried near Pompeii, the manuscripts were carbonized by the blast and have remained too fragile to open for centuries, leaving scholars with only partial and often unreadable traces of their contents. The new work focuses on PHerc. 1667, which researchers say can now be read across 20 surviving columns, and PHerc. 172, from which they recovered 70 columns of text at Oxford’s Bodlein Library.
The Vesuvius Challenge, launched by the University of Kentucky in 2023, has used machine learning, X-ray technology, a particle accelerator, and a synchrotron to generate detailed 3D maps of the scrolls. Brent Seales, chair of Heritage Science at the university and a cofounder of the project, said researchers in France and the UK produced unusually high-resolution scans, with datasets reaching as much as 300 terabytes per scroll. He said the scans came from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, and represent the largest dataset ever produced there for the project.
The software has also advanced quickly. Seales noted that it has improved significantly since Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor, and Julian Schilliger won the $700,000 Vesuvius Challenge grand prize in 2024.
Federica Nicolardi, a papyrology professor at the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II and a member of the Vesuvius Challenge team, said PHerc. 1667 had been opened and damaged in the 1980s and was once given a readability score of zero. Now, she said, virtual unwrapping makes it possible to follow sustained arguments across multiple columns, which she called “a transformational shift.”
The team also identified new books by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus, underscoring how much of the Herculaneum library may still be waiting beneath the ash. For classical studies, the significance is not only technical. It is textual: a method that once seemed experimental is beginning to restore voices that have been sealed away for nearly 2,000 years.
