A machine just read a scroll Vesuvius burnt shut in 79 AD.

Adam Spencer
Jul 2
4 min read

How do you read a 2,000 year old scroll cooked to a crisp by no less than Mt Vesuvius? Hint, it’s the same imaging tech we use to design cutting edge cancer drugs.

(First published on my Substack where you can get #NerdNews, marvellous maths and general geekery.)

('Smokin' papyri : created via midjoruney and kapwing)

A library that went up in smoke.

In 79AD Vesuvius famously destroyed the working class Roman city of Pompeii. It also buried the small, wealthy seaside getaway of Herculaneum. In doing so, it smothered a grand seaside villa, thought to belong to Julius Caesar's father-in-law no less, which held a private library of around a thousand papyrus scrolls. The scrolls were not destroyed as much as air-fried. A surge of superheated gas and ash and a lack of oxygen reducing them to charcoaled cylinders.

In 1750 local well-diggers discovered the Villa of the Papyri and a couple of years later a team working for the Bourbon king Charles found the library. Amazingly the books were still in place. Tragically they crumbled to powder when touched, let alone opened.

Brute force, subtle weights, complex chemicals, all failed to reveal these texts … until now.

A breakthrough you cannot put down.

On 25 June 2026, the Vesuvius Challenge team announced an historic first. A scroll catalogued as PHerc. 1667 had been virtually unwrapped and read end to end, without it ever being opened. The surviving piece gave up close to 1.5 metres of continuous Greek across 20 columns.

"This scroll was deemed completely unreadable when part of it was opened in the 1980s ... But now, with virtual unwrapping, we can follow sustained arguments across multiple columns. That's a transformational shift.” — Professor Federica Nicolardi, papyrologist, University of Naples, Federico II.

The potential of this find for scholars of the ancient world, is as exciting as the incredible technology that read the unreadable scrolls.

The soot of the problem.

So how does a machine find writing amid a chunk of charcoal?

The original scroll would have been a tan-brown papyrus, covered in columns of ancient Greek characters in scriptio continua. It read like a stream of consciousness, with no punctuation or space between words, all written in a black soot carbon ink.

But once Vesuvius had done its work, carbon ink sitting on carbon papyrus looked, under X-ray, like, you guessed it, nothing but carbon.

Imagine a fat weekend newspaper rolled up for delivery, then charred solid so the pages fuse together. Unroll it carelessly and you splice a line from one page onto a line from another, inventing text that was never there.

Freakishly hard to decipher yeah?

The solution was three stages of scintillating science.

Fully sync!

Step one: blast the scroll with the BM18 beam of the European Synchrotron in Grenoble. Yep, the same class of particle accelerator that scientists use to design new medicines and scan dinosaur fossils still locked in solid rock. This ring of magnets, over 800m around, throws X-rays far brighter than any hospital scanner and maps the scroll in 3D, fine enough to pick out individual papyrus fibres.

Step two: what the team calls "virtual unwrapping". Sophisticated software scans the 3D block of charcoal and effectively unrolls it into a flat surface. This is incredible given how thin the original papyrus was. Let alone before it got burnt and bubbled by the eruption.

Step three: find the ink. Researchers realised that although the ink and papyrus are now the same colour, the ink left a faint difference in surface texture. A fine cracked pattern like the craquelure or crazing on an old oil painting, marking where it once soaked in. (Yeah I had no idea that was called crazing either!)

Until now this ghostly evidence had been painstakingly traced out by hand, character by character. Now a machine-learning model reads it for itself.

You might be surprised to know that the AI being used here cannot read ancient Greek. But that is actually an advantage. Because it cannot spell, recognise a letter, or predict text, it only flags ink or no ink, dot by dot. The words that surface are real, set down by a human two thousand years ago, not conjured or hallucinated by an algorithm.

Stoic, calm and collected.

So how does a 79AD page-turner read anyway? Well whereas today the blockbuster genres are Romantasy and self-help, back in Herculaneum Epicureanism was all the rage. But PHerc, 1667 actually leans stoic.

Scholars will have to dive deeper into these initial finding to firm them up but at first glance it mulls over the Stoic notion of horme, or impulse.

"We will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature." — PHerc. 1667, unknown author.

Turns out succumbing to horme will drag you into ruinous passion and away from your goals. Preach!

Plenty more scrolls in the fire.

This is a tremendous scientific breakthrough. But like the best AI-powered advances, it now allows humans to do what they are experts at. Hopefully we can virtually unwrap many more of the 600 scrolls that are still sealed in their ancient charcoalled prisons. But while this incredible pipeline can surface the letters, turning columns of ancient Greek into edited, understood text needs papyrologists not processors.

“We could uncover around 4.5 million words of entirely new Greek and Latin literature. That's more than the total of all the literary papyri from Oxyrhynchus, all the Dead Sea Scrolls and the entire Bible, combined." — Professor Nicolardi.

Sometime before Vesuvius popped, someone wrote that we come unstuck when we stray from our own nature. Two thousand years later, a machine that cannot read, gave us this wisdom back.