AI unlocks 2,000-year-old Vesuvius scrolls, revealing possible lost Stoic philosopher work

Nearly two thousand years ago, Mount Vesuvius turned a library into ash. The scrolls it buried at Herculaneum were carbonized into solid black lumps, their text locked away—physically preserved but intellectually lost. Now, without ever unrolling them, researchers have read inside them using X-rays and artificial intelligence, and what they found may rewrite a corner of ancient philosophy.

The breakthrough belongs to the Vesuvius Challenge, an international effort launched to digitally recover texts from the scrolls buried when Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79. On June 25, papyrologists announced they had virtually unwrapped two scrolls. The first, catalogued as PHerc. 1667, yielded roughly five feet of continuous Greek text arranged across twenty columns. A second scroll, PHerc. 172, surrendered more than seventy columns of readable material. For nearly two millennia, these words had survived in the ash but remained beyond human reach.

The method combines three disciplines. Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky and co-founder of the Vesuvius Challenge, and his team use a synchrotron—essentially a powerful X-ray machine—to peer inside the sealed scrolls and detect the ink Romans used to write. The imaging reveals the letters. Papyrologists, scholars trained in ancient manuscripts, then translate what the technology uncovers. Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples Federico II, noted that part of PHerc. 1667 had been physically opened in the 1980s, but the overlapping layers of papyrus obscured the writing so thoroughly that experts had given up on it, assigning it a readability score of zero. The digital approach succeeded where physical handling had failed.

What the scroll contains matters. The handwriting and style suggest PHerc. 1667 dates to the second or third century B.C., making it one of the oldest scrolls in the collection. That early date rules out Philodemus of Gadara, the first-century-B.C. Epicurean philosopher whose works dominate the Herculaneum library. Instead, the text reads like a Stoic treatise on ethics and human behavior. More significantly, it mentions Aristocreon, the nephew and student of Chrysippus, one of the most influential Stoic philosophers of antiquity. Very little of Chrysippus' own writing has survived to the present day. If the attribution holds, this scroll represents a substantial recovery of early Stoic thought—a philosophical tradition that shaped Western ethics for centuries.

A second discovery emerged from scroll PHerc. 139. Researchers identified a new book title within it: the eighth book of Philodemus' work "On Gods." The treatise was known to exist, but this finding reveals it extended across at least eight volumes—a larger work than previously understood. Experts now plan to search other texts in the Herculaneum collection for additional volumes that may belong to the same series, suggesting the digital method could unlock entire lost works one scroll at a time.

The scale of what remains unread is staggering. More than six hundred Herculaneum scrolls have never been opened. The villa where they were preserved is believed to have belonged to the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, suggesting the collection may contain writings of considerable historical weight. Each unopened scroll represents a chance to recover lost knowledge about Roman philosophy, literature, and daily life. The Vesuvius Challenge has demonstrated that the barrier to reading them is no longer physical—it is technological and human. As the team refines its methods, the intellectual inaccessibility that has lasted nearly two millennia may finally begin to lift.