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The First Herculaneum Scroll, Read

A 2,000-year-old scroll read in full without ever being opened

The First Herculaneum Scroll, Read

PHerc. 1667 — a carbonized papyrus scroll sealed by Vesuvius in 79 AD and too fragile to physically unroll — has been read end to end for the first time, virtually unwrapped with X-ray CT scanning and machine learning by the Vesuvius Challenge. The page itself is the primary source: a scrollable, zoomable image of the actual unwrapped writing surface, with translated excerpts from the Stoic ethics treatise (it names Aristocreon, nephew of the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus) that nobody has read in two thousand years.

scrollprize.org ↗

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