Read Without Opening
In AD 79 Vesuvius turned a library of papyrus scrolls into lumps of charcoal. Unroll one and it crumbles. In 2026 a whole scroll was read without ever being opened. Here are the three steps, simplified.
1 · Unroll it, inside the computer
An X-ray scan shows the inside of the scroll as a slice: a tight, squashed spiral of papyrus. Software traces the spiral and flattens it. Drag the slider to unroll.
The small marks travelling along the papyrus are letters. In a real scan the spiral is crushed and its layers touch, which is why tracing it is one of the hardest steps.
2 · Find the ink
The ancient ink was made largely of carbon, so it looks almost the same as the charred papyrus. Below is a flattened strip. Switch between what the scan shows and what an ink-finding model marks.
Simulated. The word is the one read first from inside a closed scroll, in 2023: ΠΟΡΦΥΡΑϹ, “purple,” found by a 21-year-old student in an open challenge.
3 · Why it can’t just make up words
Language models are known for inventing text. The scroll model is built differently: each guess looks at only a small patch, so it can tell ink here from no ink here, but it cannot know which word it is in. Make the patch smaller and see what one patch can know.
“Each forward pass through the model can only rely on local information, making full-letterform hallucinations from linguistic or word-level priors practically impossible.”
And once, the ink became visible on its own: in an improved scan of another scroll, the ink appeared directly in the X-ray volume, where it matched the model’s 2023 reading — an independent physical check.
4 · What was done, and what is checked
| Step | Status |
|---|---|
| 2023: the first word, “purple”; then 2,000+ characters | Reviewed by scholars, “clear and unanimous” |
| 2023 reading confirmed by ink later seen directly in a scan | Independent physical check |
| 2026: PHerc. 1667 read end to end, 22 columns | Transcribed and checked by papyrologists |
| The 2026 paper as a whole | Preprint, not yet peer-reviewed |
| “A Stoic work,” 2nd century BC | The team’s working interpretation |
Two thousand years closed
- AD 79Vesuvius carbonizes the library of a villa at Herculaneum.
- 1752The Villa of the Papyri is found: more than 1,800 scrolls. Some are thrown away as charcoal.
- 19th centuryAn attempt to open PHerc. 1667 leaves only its inner core.
- 1969A second attempt finds no visible writing and makes the fragment smaller still.
- 2023The open Vesuvius Challenge: the first word, “purple,” then 2,000+ characters.
- June 2026PHerc. 1667 read end to end without opening: a work of Stoic ethics.