In a First, Scientists Fully Read a Charred Herculaneum Scroll—without Ever Opening It
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A team led by computer scientist Brent Seales, at the University of Kentucky, presented at the end of June 2026 the complete reading of an ancient roll carbonized by Vesuvius, without ever unfolding it. These calcined manuscripts seemed lost, because any attempt to open them reduced them to ashes. Herculanum's papyrus are now read by virtual derouncing, which combines X-ray imaging with artificial intelligence. A roller read without being peeled…
In a first, scientists fully read a charred Herculaneum Scroll—without ever opening it
“These unopened Herculaneum Scrolls look like dead books, but they’re not. They’re starting to speak again.”Almost 2,000 years ago, Mount Vesuvius devastated the Roman city of Pompeii and its neighboring town, Herculaneum. Miraculously, however, a library of ancient scrolls at Herculaneum survived—in a carbonized form so fragile that scholars dared not touch it. But scientists found a workaround, as they typically tend to do.In a first, research…
In the penultimate installment of the season, Alberto Aparici opens the doors of the mysterious library to discover one of the greatest treasures of Antiquity: the papyrus of Herculano, charred by the eruption of Vesuvius almost two thousand years ago. Thanks to a revolutionary technique of virtual reading through X-rays and artificial intelligence, some of those manuscripts begin to finally reveal their content, demonstrating that technology ca…
Reading an entire ancient scroll without ever opening it
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. The Vesuvius Challenge is a machine learning and computer vision competition to read the Herculaneum scrolls. We have completely virtually unwr…
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