PHerc. 1667 — The First Unrolled Herculaneum Scroll

[Tintin]

“The recovered text is a philosophical treatise on ethics, and the evidence points to a Stoic work: it turns on human nature, impulse, and the moral progress of human beings, and its final preserved column names Aristocreon — nephew and disciple of the great Stoic Chrysippus — which, together with the language and themes of the text, places it in a Stoic context and dates it to the 2nd century BC.”

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A fascinating project which is generating some well-justified excitement: the Vesuvius Challenge.

PHerc. 1667 — The First Unrolled Herculaneum Scroll

Complete virtual unwrapping and reading of a rolled Herculaneum papyrus
PDF here: https://scrollprize.org/pdf/main.pdf

The first Herculaneum scroll ever virtually unrolled and read end to end — a fragmentary Stoic ethical treatise (2nd century BC), recovered without opening the carbonized papyrus. Presented in three views: a lightly-normalized raw edition and two reading editions.

Greek transcription of PHerc. 1667 by Giorgio Angelotti, Stephen Parsons, Federica Nicolardi, Youssef Nader, et al. — "Complete virtual unwrapping and reading of a rolled Herculaneum papyrus" (Vesuvius Challenge, 2026). Released under CC BY-NC 4.0. Preprint: https://scrollprize.org/pdf/main.pdf · Announcement: https://scrollprize.org/firstscroll

Attribution
Original Author
Unattributed (Stoic, 2nd c. BC)
Source
Vesuvius Challenge (Angelotti et al.)
License
CC BY-NC 4.0

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Continuous reading edition here: https://www.kevilex.com/texts/6982ef...s%2Fpherc-1667

Images and overview of the challenge can be seen here: https://scrollprize.org/firstscroll

A brief description of the methodology employed, here:

- Herculaneum scrolls scanned via synchrotron micro‑CT. These are the core targets for "virtual unwrapping" and reading.

- Detached fragments with exposed ink on their surfaces. These are especially useful for building and validating ML approaches (e.g., ink detection), because they provide ground truth signals.

The unwrapping process image data: https://scrollprize.org/unwrapping

[Bill Ryan]

Thanks!

(See also this thread from 2015:)

• X-Rays Reveal Snippets From Papyrus Scrolls That Survived Mount Vesuvius

And this post of mine on the DOGE thread from February 2025, when DOGE was still a thing before Donald Trump shut it all down for reasons unknown.

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In his Signal Hour news update video yesterday Chris Martenson showcased that this is just one of the DOGE team's super-smart young geniuses who have been using AI tools to reveal USAID's criminality. And the Woke Left have doxxed him and his parents and want him dead. (Literally.)

But watch this 3 minute video. This young guy, Luke Farritor, is a hope for humanity. Before his work for DOGE, he shared the Vesuvius prize for discovering the very first readable word from a blackened, rock-solid 2000 year old charred scroll that looks like a hunk of charcoal.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zpflT8XuSyg