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Virtually unwrapped text from Herculaneum scroll PHercParis.4.

Historic Breakthrough: Ancient works recovered from carbonized Herculaneum scrolls—The day the Herculaneum scrolls began speaking again.- University of Kentucky

NAPLES, Italy (June 25, 2026) — The Vesuvius Challenge has achieved a historic breakthrough in the recovery of the Herculaneum scrolls — revealing new texts, titles and authors unknown to history and ushering in a new era for the study of the ancient world.

At the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli Vittorio Emanuele III — with Mount Vesuvius rising in the distance — lead researchers, collaborators and distinguished guests gathered to mark the milestone decades in the making.

The achievement underscores both the scale of the scientific breakthrough and the extraordinary international collaboration that made it possible.

It also marks a pivotal moment for a project the University of Kentucky has led for years — steadily advancing toward a goal many once thought impossible.

“For nearly two millennia, many of these texts have been physically preserved but intellectually inaccessible,” Brent Seales, Vesuvius Challenge co-founder and the Stanley and Karen Pigman Chair of Heritage Science at the University of Kentucky, said. “Today — after years of interdisciplinary work combining advanced imaging, artificial intelligence (AI), academic research and an innovation contest — we are finally able to read them.”

Among the discoveries:

Full virtual unwrapping of the surviving portion of PHerc. 1667 — revealing nearly 1.5 meters of text across 20 columns
Recovery of more than 70 columns of text from PHerc. 172, housed at Oxford’s Bodleian Library
Identification of completely new books from the ancient world by Epicurean philosopher Philodemus, including On Vices, Book 1 and On Gods, Book 8
Recovery of sufficient text to support new critical scholarly editions

The findings represent the most significant revelation of text since the earliest attempts to physically open the scrolls more than two centuries ago.

black carbonized scroll with red laser lines shining on it

Roman Scroll Damaged by Mount Vesuvius Eruption Is Read Again for First Time in 2,000 Years – People Magazine

June 26, 2026 –

Researchers have been able to read part of an ancient scroll burned by Mount Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago for the first time.

The Herculaneum scrolls, named after a Roman town carbonized by the eruption of Vesuvius in Pompeii, Italy, in 79 A.D., were thought to be unreadable until a major scientific breakthrough with the help of artificial intelligence.

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Thanks to the scientific advances, however, the PHerc. 1667 scroll has now been fully virtually unwrapped, allowing researchers to read nearly five feet of text across 20 columns, according to a release from the EduceLab laboratory in Kentucky, which has been at the forefront of the research.

A virtually unwrapped piece of one scroll shows ancient Greek text.

Scientists decipher new secrets from ancient scrolls scorched by Vesuvius eruption: “Finally able to read them” – CBS News

June 26, 2026 –

A University of Kentucky project using artificial intelligence to help decode an ancient Roman mystery has led to a major discovery, researchers announced Thursday.

In 79 A.D., the eruption of Mount Vesuvius buried the Roman city of Pompeii and the nearby town of Herculaneum. During a dig in Herculaneum in the 18th century, archaeologists found 1,800 papyrus scrolls in an intact ancient library, deep under the site of a villa that was destroyed by Vesuvius’ eruption. But reading them was impossible: The scrolls are brittle and charred, and unravelling them turns them into ash.

For centuries, researchers have worked to interpret the scrolls. Recent technology led to a breakthrough: A particle accelerator and AI were used to identify ink, even faint traces, allowing researchers to virtually unwrap the delicate scrolls. But interpreting the ancient language is another project entirely.

Scientists have just unlocked the secrets of an ancient scroll torched by Mount Vesuvius – Washington Post

June 25, 2026 –

Once buried in hot rocks, ash and lava, the scrolls are so fragile and carbonized that they fall apart at the touch. Since their discovery in 1752, various attempts to read them — splitting them open and scraping away each slice of ancient paper with a knife, pouring mercury between the layers, soaking them in a mix of gelatin and acetic acid — have destroyed them or rendered them illegible.

Now, researches say they have managed to completely unwrap and read the surviving portion of one scroll, about 20 columns of text, using machine learning methods that they hope can unlock further discoveries from a lost classical library.

Brent Seales and Stephen Parsons at the Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples, Italy

Vesuvius buried these scrolls. AI is bringing them back. – National Geographic

June 24, 2026 –

Imagine inheriting the finest bottle of wine ever made—a rare vintage unlike anything else in the world. Now imagine the bottle is so delicate that even touching the cork would shatter it. It’s there in front of you, a priceless treasure. But “you can’t drink it,” muses Giorgio Angelotti. That’s the maddening predicament Angelotti and generations of other scholars have endured trying to decipher the Herculaneum scrolls.

The A.D. 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius that ravaged Pompeii also buried the nearby town of Herculaneum, entombing its celebrated library at the Villa of the Papyri under 60 feet of ash and rock. Hundreds of papyrus scrolls survived the inferno thanks to that heavy blanket of volcanic debris. Instead of burning, they baked into brittle, misshapen lumps—preserved yet so fragile that archaeologists feared touching them.

The Villa of the Papyri collection is the only known library to survive from Greco-Roman antiquity. Still, its prized texts have long been impossible to read. Even the slightest brush can turn them to dust.
Now, nearly 2,000 years after the Vesuvian tragedy, the scrolls are giving up their secrets at last. Using particle accelerators and artificial intelligence, researchers finally have the ability to virtually “unwrap” the Herculaneum scrolls and read their contents.

Students Decipher 2,000-Year-Old Herculaneum Scrolls

February 13, 2024 –

Almost two millennia after the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius hardened them into lumps of coal in 79 CE, previously indecipherable papyrus scrolls from the ancient library of Herculaneum are finally yielding their secrets, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) technologies created with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

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The three decoded more than 2,000 characters of text, which papyrologists have translated to a discussion of the nature of pleasure, most likely part of a previously unknown work by Epicurean poet and philosopher Philodemus of Gadara. In the translated passages, the author considers whether the availability or scarcity of goods such as food affects our experience of pleasure—and critiques intellectual rivals who “have nothing to say about pleasure, either in general or in particular, when it is a question of definition.”

These newly discovered passages represent just 5 percent of one scroll. But for Seales and his colleagues, the findings show that what was once thought impossible is now within reach. On the heels of this latest breakthrough, the founders of the Vesuvius Challenge have announced their goal for phase 2: to read 90 percent of the four fully scanned scrolls within the next year.

Image of a 2,000-year-old scroll that was scorched in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius

Secrets of ancient Herculaneum scroll deciphered by AI – NBC News

February 9, 2024 –

ROME — Buried in ash after Mount Vesuvius’ cataclysmic eruption in A.D. 79, hundreds of papyrus scrolls have kept their secrets hidden for centuries. But archeologists have now been able to decipher some of the ancient text with the help of artificial intelligence.

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The breakthrough came after a global competition was launched to accelerate the reading of the texts. The Vesuvius Challenge offered $1 million in prizes to anyone who could solve the problem and find a way to read the remaining 270 closed scrolls, most of which are preserved in a library in Naples, which is around 8 miles west of Herculaneum

It was launched by a team at the University of Kentucky led by professor Brent Seales, who released software and thousands of 3D X-ray images of three papyrus fragments and two rolled-up scrolls, in the hope that global research groups would take up the challenge.

First Word Discovered in Unopened Herculaneum Scroll by 21yo Computer Science Student

October 12, 2023 –

The Herculaneum papyri, ancient scrolls housed in the library of a private villa near Pompeii, were buried and carbonized by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. For almost 2,000 years, this lone surviving library from antiquity was buried underground under 20 meters of volcanic mud. In the 1700s, they were excavated, and while they were in some ways preserved by the eruption, they were so fragile that they would turn to dust if mishandled. How do you read a scroll you can’t open? For hundreds of years, this question went unanswered.

That is until Luke Farritor, a contestant of the Vesuvius Challenge, became the first person in two millennia to see an entire word from within an unopened scroll this August. For that, we are thrilled to award Luke a $40,000 First Letters Prize, which required contestants to find at least 10 letters in a 4 cm² area in a scroll.

Scrolls That Survived Vesuvius Divulge Their First Word

By Nicholas Wade

October 12, 2023 – From deep within a papyrus scroll that has not been read in almost 2,000 years and would crumble to pieces if unrolled, researchers have retrieved a handful of letters and a single word: “porphyras,” ancient Greek for “purple.”

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The new approach used to read the scrolls has been developed over the past 20 years by Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky. It uses computer tomography, the same technique as in CT scans, plus advancements in artificial intelligence.

Herculaneum Scrolls: A 20-Year Journey to Read the Unreadable

By Erin Wickey

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Aug.24, 2023) — Restoring an ancient library from the ashes of Mount Vesuvius is now closer to a reality. To highlight the progress, this is the first in a four-video series featuring Brent Seales, University of Kentucky Alumni Professor in the Department of Computer Science in the Stanley and Karen Pigman College of Engineering and his Digital Restoration Initiative team.

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UK’s Brent Seales Launches Global Competition to decipher Herculaneum Scrolls

By Lindsey Piercy

LEXINGTON, Ky. (March 21, 2023) — They are among the most iconic and inaccessible of the world’s vast collection of damaged manuscripts.

Burned and buried in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, the Herculaneum scrolls offer a unique window to the ancient world.

Unfortunately, they are too fragile to unroll.

But now, you can help resurrect the ancient library from the volcanic ashes. Brent Seales, a computer science professor at the University of Kentucky, is leading a global competition to read the charred scrolls after demonstrating that an artificial intelligence program (AI) can successfully extract letters and symbols from X-ray images of the unrolled papyri (EduceLab-scrolls).

Join the challenge

‘Research Made Possible’ Podcast: $14 Million NSF Grant for UK EduceLab

By Alicia Gregory

LEXINGTON, Ky. (April 19, 2022) — It’s the signature on a bourbon barrel. It’s the ancient footprints in Mammoth Cave. Heritage science is all around us and has deep roots in the Commonwealth. Kentucky’s story begins in prehistoric times, when mammoths roamed the Ohio River Valley at Big Bone Lick.

In November 2021, the University of Kentucky announced a new $14 million mid-scale infrastructure grant from the National Science Foundation, that will allow UK to tell that story in new, groundbreaking ways through the lens of heritage science.

Listen in on Part 1 and Part 2

UK Awarded $14 Million NSF Grant to Launch World-Class Cultural Heritage Lab

The University of Kentucky takes a big step in advancing heritage science with the immense help of a $14 million infrastructure grant from the National Science Foundation. The grant supports the development of a world-class heritage lab at UK’s own William S. Webb Museum of Anthropology.

“We are at a turning point, science and technology present a host of exciting opportunities to the heritage sector. They must not be wasted.” Dr. Brent Seales said.

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Prof. Brent Seales Using Light Brighter Than the Sun to Read Herculaneum Scrolls

Using light 10 billion times brighter than the sun, Professor Brent Seales and his team recently captured images of authentic Herculaneum material at Diamond Light Source, a high-energy physics facility in Oxford, England. Thanks to funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation, the team was able to purchase the amount of beam time needed to scan — at unprecedented spatial resolution — two intact scrolls and four fragments belonging to the Institut de France in Paris.

“This scan session promises to be a key moment in our quest for a reliable pathway to reading the invisible library,” said Seales. “The brightness and speed of the Diamond beam, and its ability to handle massive data sets, are crucial. We are using the Diamond facility to acquire scans of complete scrolls and also open fragments, with the hope that the open fragments will form a reference library — or training set — that can inform our machine learning software approach to visualizing carbon ink,” Seales continued. “If things work as we expect, the scans and the machine learning will open up the chance to see the ink very clearly for the first time.”

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Brent Seales - $2 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

DRI Receives $2 Million Mellon Foundation Grant

The University of Kentucky is poised to become a world-class leader in “unwrapping” cultural artifacts. Thanks, in large part, to a $2 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Professor Brent Seales finally has the materials access, funding support and technical approach needed to solve the 2,000-year-old mystery of the Herculaneum papyri.

The prestigious Mellon grant will provide the resources the team needs to virtually unwrap and digitally restore the scrolls. It will also support the electronic compilation and dissemination of the entire Herculaneum collection, which is currently spread across four different institutions: the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, the British Library, the Institut de France and the Biblioteca Nazoinale di Napoli.

Innovative Machine Learning Tool Reveals Carbon Ink

A new study by Dr. Seales and his team refutes claims that carbon ink is “invisible” in micro-CT scanning and conclusively shows that machine learning can be used to elicit the stubborn text. Their groundbreaking work, featured in the science e-journal PLOS One (From Invisibility to Readability: Recovering the Ink of Herculaneum) demonstrates how characteristics other than density differences, which is the traditional imaging factor in x-ray, can be capitalized upon in micro-CT to reveal carbon ink writing. The team developed a 3D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that identifies the unique data pattern generated by the scanner when ink is present on the surface of papyrus, versus when the papyrus is blank. In the study, the team successfully applied the CNN to both proxy materials and the most well-known and sought-after of carbon-inked texts, Herculaneum papyri. The team also developed a modification of the tool that can generate color renditions from the scans of the inked papyrus, thus providing a realistic facsimile of the original instead of just a traditional black and white x-ray image.

‘Behind the Blue’: UK’s Brent Seales Digitally ‘Unwraps’ Ancient Texts, Other Treasures

By Carl Nathe

LEXINGTON, Ky. (May 15, 2019) — Thanks to work spearheaded by University of Kentucky College of Engineering faculty member W. Brent Seales, UK is poised to become the world-class leader in digitally “unwrapping” and restoring one-of-a-kind cultural artifacts, such as ancient manuscripts.

Seales and his students have worked for more than two decades to noninvasively image and unfurl all types of fragile texts, such as “Beowulf,” the Dead Sea Scrolls and more. Seales, professor and chair of UK’s Department of Computer Science, has earned a reputation as “the man who can read the unreadable.”

PI Professor Brent Seales Awarded NEH Grant to Uncover Texts of Herculaneum

By Lindsey Piercy March 5, 2019

Professor Brent Seales has received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant for his groundbreaking project, “Reading the Invisible Library: Rescuing the Hidden Texts of Herculaneum.” The Digital Humanities Advancement Grant of $325,000 will allow Seales and his dedicated team to continue development of computerized techniques to recover writings from the Herculaneum library, a collection of undecipherable papyrus scrolls were carbonized during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE (Common Era). More specifically, funding from the NEH is being used to develop a machine learning approach that will enable researchers to see hidden writing that is otherwise very difficult to visualize in X-ray based images. The funds support the construction of a large-scale neural network, including student and staff time for software development.

Brent Seales - Reading the Invisible Library. — Brent Seales (center), professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science at UK, is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for his groundbreaking project, "Reading the Invisible Library."

Virtual Unwrapping and DRI Research Featured in International Media

The work of Professor Brent Seales and his Digital Restoration Team were featured recently on the PBS science show NOVA and on the streaming network, Curiosity Stream. The hour-long NOVA episode aired November 6th. Curiosity Stream is a subscription-based, science-focused streaming network from the founder of Discovery Channel. Two clips from the excellent show can be viewed here and here, but users can sign up for a free two week trial to view the entire 20-minute Breakthrough segment, called “Herculaneum Scrolls: Unravelling History.”

The team’s recent scans of Herculaneum scrolls at Diamond Light Source, a synchrotron located just outside of Oxford, England, garnered worldwide attention, including an appearance on BBC Radio’s Inside Science. (See all of the international press coverage here.) A TV production team from the U.K. also followed Seales and his team to Diamond to record the scan session and create this “teaser” video for a documentary about Seales and his work. The final production will appear on networks around the world, including NatGeo in the U.K. and SBS in Australia.