Scientists Have Deciphered the Surviving Fragments of a 2,000-Year-Old Philosophical Treatise Frozen in Time by Mount Vesuvius’ Eruption

The papyrus manuscript was part of a vast library preserved by volcanic ash. Now, the remaining passages—which examine ethics, knowledge and human nature—are accessible for the first time since 79 C.E.

Ellen Wexler | Writer and Special Projects Editor

June 26, 2026 3:51 p.m.

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When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 C.E., volcanic ash buried a vast library in the Roman town of Herculaneum. The hundreds of papyrus scrolls trapped inside were only rediscovered more than 1,500 years later, in the mid-18th century. But when scholars tried to unroll them, the carbonized manuscripts crumbled to dust.

Every generation that followed faced the same dilemma: They could wait for technology to advance, abandoning hope of reading the ancient texts in their own lifetime. Or they could try to open the scrolls themselves—and risk destroying them.

In recent years, researchers have settled on a third option. Using advanced imaging and artificial intelligence, they’re deciphering the scrolls without needing to unroll them at all.

The Vesuvius Challenge has accelerated the process by turning it into a public competition, complete with cash prizes. In 2023, a student won $40,000 for deciphering a single word—“purple”—from an unopened scroll. Later, contestants would identify 2,000 Greek characters from one scroll ($700,000) and the title of another ($60,000).

Now, for the very first time, researchers have recovered all surviving text from a single scroll. The nearly five-foot-long segment includes roughly 20 columns of ancient Greek philosophy, accessible for the first time in nearly 2,000 years.

“The tech actually does look like magic, but it’s not,” Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, said at a press conference. “It’s the remarkable means to a higher calling: the restoration of lost voices from the ancient world through the texts that they wrote in these fragile, enigmatic scrolls.”

Known as PHerc. 1667, this scroll discusses the nature of human knowledge, the ability to distinguish good from evil, and the merits of acting on reason rather than on impulse—ideas central to the philosophy of Stoicism. The manuscript also references Aristocreon, the nephew of the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus.

The library of scrolls was found in the 1750s at a lavish villa that may have belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. Inside were some 1,800 papyrus fragments, the only surviving collection of its kind from the Greco-Roman world.

Based on snippets of recovered text, many of the scrolls appear to contain works by Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher who lived in Herculaneum during the first century B.C.E. Epicureanism is a philosophy devoted to the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

“Stoics and Epicureans were rival schools,” Federica Nicolardi, the lead papyrologist for the Vesuvius Challenge, tells National Geographic’s Sam Kean, but “debates and polemics between them were common.”

Although the team has deciphered all surviving portions of PHerc. 1667, more than half of its contents were lost to previous generations’ failed attempts to read them. According to the team’s preprint, 19th-century researchers accidentally destroyed some of the scroll’s outer layers. Renewed efforts in the 1960s and ’80s caused more damage, revealing only small, illegible fragments of text. The scroll’s diameter, which started out at 1.9 inches, is now less than 0.8 inches.

“What survives today is only a small portion of the original scroll,” Nicolardi said at the press conference. “Although the title and the upper portion of the text have been lost, we can now follow the author’s argument across consecutive lines and columns.”

Seales has been working on virtually unwrapping the scrolls since the early 2000s. The process involved imaging the bundles of papyrus using technology similar to CT scanners, isolating thin layers and then stitching them together. In 2023, he partnered with two Silicon Valley investors and launched the Vesuvius Challenge.

The project’s leaders didn’t expect to make so many breakthroughs in such a short time. In recent years, the frontier had belonged primarily to computer scientists—but now, Seales hopes that they can start passing the torch to historians and papyrologists.

“I consider this to be a seminal moment because we’re going to, from now on, be talking more about the texts than we’re talking about the technology,” he tells the Washington Post’s Miriam Waldvogel.

Based on the handwriting style, Nicolardi thinks that PHerc. 1667 dates to the second or third century B.C.E., which would make it one of the oldest scrolls in the library. The title and author have been lost to history, but experts suspect it wasn’t written by Philodemus. Perhaps, they theorize, Chrysippus was the author.

Chrysippus was a foundational figure in Stoicism, but modern scholars only know of his writings from references in other works. “To have access to a source text rather than quotes and summaries, which can be modified or interpreted by other writers, is very important,” Thomas Coward, a classicist at the University of Bristol in England who isn’t part of the Vesuvius Challenge, tells New Scientist’s Hayley Bennett.

PHerc. 1667’s surviving passages discourage “an excess in the impulse,” warning readers not to allow passion to triumph over reason, and advocate for phronesis, or practical wisdom. The text also explores the limits of knowledge: “We will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature.”

“By ‘our own nature,’ the author appears to refer to human rationality and our innate inclination toward goodness (echoing Stoic philosophy), perhaps suggesting the use of reason and listening to one’s inner drive are leading and crucial principles for seeking knowledge and virtue,” Claudio Vergara, another papyrologist on the Vesuvius Challenge team, says in a statement.

The team revealed several other new discoveries, including the identification of a title in PHerc. 139: Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8. Historians had previously known about On Gods, but they hadn’t been aware that it contained more than one book. The researchers also announced that they’d deciphered more than 70 columns from PHerc. 172, which contains part of Philodemus’ On Vices.

The Vesuvius Challenge is now offering a $1 million prize to the first person or team to decipher another scroll in full by this time next year. As Nat Friedman, one of the founders of the project, said at the press conference, contestants are required to share their work so researchers can use their techniques to push the project forward.

“We’ve developed a systematic and a repeatable approach,” Seales told the audience. “Now it’s only a matter of time until we read all of the scrolls.”

Ellen Wexler | | Read More

Ellen Wexler is a staff writer and special projects editor, digital, for Smithsonian magazine.