Vesuvius Challenge reads an entire Herculaneum scroll for the first time

Category: ML research
Status: confirmed
Sources: Vesuvius Challenge, The Register, HN
Summary: The Vesuvius Challenge team announced on 2026-06-25 that PHerc. 1667, a Herculaneum papyrus carbonized by the 79 AD eruption of Vesuvius, has been digitally unrolled and read end to end without physically opening it, about 1.4 meters of papyrus and roughly 22 columns of ancient Greek identified as a philosophical treatise. The pipeline scanned the scroll with high-resolution phase-contrast X-ray microtomography at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, reconstructed a flat readable surface, then used machine learning to detect faint ink traces on the carbonized fibers. Higher-resolution imaging of PHerc. Paris 4 independently confirmed the 2023 Grand Prize readings, and PHerc. 139 was identified as Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8. All tomographic data, reconstructed surfaces, and transcriptions were released under a Creative Commons license.
Why it matters: It is the clearest demonstration yet that an imaging plus machine-learning pipeline can recover entire lost texts from damaged media, and the open data release lets others reproduce and extend the method.
Follow-up: Track the rest of the scroll corpus being read, independent reproduction against the released data, and method or model details.