For the First Time in History, One of the Charred Herculaneum Scrolls Has Been Read in Full

An international team of engineers and scholars led by the University of Kentucky has virtually unrolled a papyrus from the Villa of the Papyri, the library that perished together with Herculaneum in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD.

The reading was made possible by AI and by imaging with a particle accelerator and a synchrotron.

This particular scroll was opened in the 1980s and was assigned a legibility rating of zero. Now, according to the papyrologist Federica Nicolardi of Naples, a coherent text can be seen, concerned with ethics, the arts and human behaviour.

The scroll may have carried a Stoic treatise. Among its putative authors are named Chrysippus or Epicurus, and it is dated to the 2nd or the end of the 3rd century BC.

It was not the AI that read the scroll: it merely assisted with the scanning, and the deciphering was done by papyrologists. Even so, it is becoming clear that the reading of all the scrolls is now merely a matter of time, and that scholars will find at their disposal a full-fledged library of Antiquity, with dozens of lost texts.