News | February 5, 2025

Inside of Herculaneum Scroll Seen For First Time Since 79 AD

Bodleian Libraries

Scroll PHerc. 172, one of three Herculaneum scrolls housed at the Bodleian Libraries

The Bodleian Libraries and the Vesuvius Challenge have announced a breakthrough in the bid to decipher text preserved on papyrus scrolls from the ancient site of Herculaneum which was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.

Researchers have successfully generated the first image of the inside of scroll PHerc. 172, one of three Herculaneum scrolls housed at the Bodleian Libraries, marking a significant step forward in the ability to recover texts from the ancient world.

The image of the virtually unrolled scroll shows a considerable part of the papyrus and some columns of text, with about the last 26 lines of each column. While efforts are underway by University of Oxford scholars to interpret the text, the Vesuvius Challenge is inviting others to come forward and join the collective effort to fully decipher its contents. 

One of the first words to be translated was the Ancient Greek διατροπή meaning ‘disgust’, which appears twice within a few columns of text. 

Since the scroll was scanned at the Diamond Light Source in Harwell in July 2024 at the UK’s national synchrotron science facility, the Vesuvius Challenge team has worked with AI to piece together the images and enhance the clarity of the text. Researchers are further refining the image using a new segmentation approach in the hopes that it will improve the coherence and clarity of the lines of text currently visible, and perhaps reach the end of the papyrus, the innermost part of the carbonised scroll, where the colophon with the title of the work may be preserved.

Cropped image of PHerc.172, showing the word 'disgust'
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Bodleian Libraries

Cropped image of PHerc.172, showing the word 'disgust'

Scroll interior
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Bodleian Libraries

Scroll interior

Visible ink
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Bodleian Libraries

Visible ink

The Oxford scroll, donated in the early 19th century by Ferdinand IV, King of Napes and Sicily, is unique among Herculaneum materials due to the chemical composition of its ink which appears more clearly in X-ray scans. Researchers believe that the ink may contain a denser contaminant such as lead, but further testing will be needed to identify the precise ‘recipe’ that has made the ink so much more legible than other scrolls which have been part of the Vesuvius Challenge. 

The machine learning employed for this project focuses solely on the detection of the presence of ink as the models do not have any understanding of language and cannot recognise characters. As a result, the next phase - the transcription and translation of the text - is entrusted to the expertise of human scholars. 

Richard Ovenden, Bodley’s Librarian & Helen Hamlyn Director of the University Libraries, said: “It’s an incredible moment in history as librarians, computer scientists and scholars of the classical period are collaborating to see the unseen. The astonishing strides forward made with imaging, and AI are enabling us to look inside scrolls that have not been read for almost 2,000 years. This project is a perfect example of libraries, humanities and computer science complementing each other’s expertise to understand our common past.”

The Vesuvius Challenge, the global initiative that was launched in 2023 to discover the contents of the Herculaneum Scrolls without any physical intervention to the scrolls themselves, continues to encourage contributions from researchers across the world. 

Dr. Brent Seales, Co-Founder of Vesuvius Challenge and Principal Investigator of EduceLab said: “We are thrilled with the successful imaging of this scroll from the Bodleian Libraries and are grateful to our partners for their support and collaboration. This scroll contains more recoverable text than we have ever seen in a scanned Herculaneum scroll. Despite these exciting results, much work remains to improve our software methods so that we can read the entirety of this and the other Herculaneum scrolls.”