Record · Classical world · Europe · AD 79

How Do You Read a 2,000-Year-Old Book Too Fragile to Open?

By the Our Earth's History editorial team · Researched and written with AI assistance, checked against the sources below · How we make it

Published 2026-07-20 · Reviewed 2026-09-19

TL;DR — Vesuvius buried the Villa of the Papyri in AD 79 and turned its library into charcoal. The scrolls crumble if opened, so researchers now scan them with X-rays and use software to read the ink inside. The first full word came in 2023 and whole passages followed in 2024.

Some books cannot be opened. In a seaside villa outside Herculaneum, a working library of Greek philosophy was sealed under twenty meters of volcanic debris on the day the town died. For two and a half centuries after workmen found it, the only way to read a scroll was to unroll it, and unrolling it meant breaking it. The scanning method described below is the first that reads the text and leaves the object whole.

Quick facts

When: AD 79 (eruption) · 1752 (rediscovery) · 2023–24 (first text read by scan)
Where: Villa of the Papyri, Herculaneum, Bay of Naples, Italy
Who: Philodemus of Gadara (author of most identified texts); the Vesuvius Challenge teams
Outcome: More than 1,000 carbonized rolls survive; the first are now being read without unrolling

What the villa held

The Villa of the Papyri was a large private house on the shore west of Herculaneum, the town next to Pompeii. Bourbon tunnellers reached it in 1752 and pulled out hundreds of blackened cylinders that they first took for burnt logs. They were papyrus rolls. Counts vary with how fragments are tallied, but more than 1,000 rolls survive, and some inventories reach about 1,800.

The texts identified so far are mostly Greek and mostly Epicurean. Many are works of Philodemus of Gadara, a philosopher who lived in the area in the first century BC, which suggests the library grew around his circle. It is the only library from the ancient world that has reached us as a set of physical books rather than as later copies.

Why the eruption preserved the scrolls instead of burning them

Pompeii lay under about six meters of ash and pumice. Herculaneum, closer to the volcano, was hit by pyroclastic surges and then buried under roughly twenty meters of material that hardened into rock. The heat carbonized wood, food and papyrus instead of consuming them, and the deep, airless burial kept them from rotting afterwards. Wooden doors, roof beams, a cradle and loaves of bread survived at Herculaneum for the same reason the scrolls did.

Carbonization is also what made the scrolls unreadable. Papyrus baked into carbon is brittle, black and fused layer to layer. The ink, a carbon black, is the same color as the page.

Two centuries of unrolling by force

From the 1750s the Vatican scriptor Antonio Piaggio built a machine that peeled a scroll open a few millimeters a day on silk threads and animal membrane. It worked, slowly, and it destroyed much of what it touched. Later attempts used chemicals and cutting. Some scrolls were split lengthwise and scraped layer by layer, the outer text copied and discarded to reach the next. By the twentieth century a large share of the collection had been damaged, and the intact rolls were left alone because no one could open them without losing them.

Reading without opening

The alternative is to image the roll rather than unroll it. A scroll goes into a high-resolution X-ray CT scanner, the same principle as a medical scan, which records thousands of cross-sections through the wound layers. Software traces the surface of the papyrus through that stack of slices and flattens it into a virtual sheet. Because the ink and the papyrus are both carbon, the ink is nearly invisible in the scan; a machine-learning model trained on the few places where ink is known to sit learns to detect the faint change in texture it leaves.

The method was developed over about two decades by Brent Seales and colleagues at the University of Kentucky, who used it in 2015 to read a charred Hebrew scroll from En-Gedi. The Herculaneum rolls were a harder case. The layers are packed tighter, and the ink shows no contrast at all.

The Vesuvius Challenge

In 2023 the Kentucky team and two technology investors released scans of unopened rolls and offered prizes to anyone who could read them. In October 2023 a student, Luke Farritor, found the first complete word inside an unopened scroll: the Greek for “purple.” In February 2024 the grand prize went to a team of three who had recovered more than 2,000 characters across fifteen columns of the same roll, a discussion in the manner of Philodemus of pleasure and of whether scarcer things give more of it.

The competition continued through 2024 with new rolls and new goals, including reading a scroll from end to end and recovering the titles of the works. Progress is reported on the prize site listed in the sources.

What has been read, and what has not

The passages recovered so far are a small fraction of one roll. The rest of the collection, including rolls in Naples and Paris that have never been opened, remains to be scanned and read. Whether the villa also held a Latin library is unknown; excavation of the lower floors stopped in the 1990s. The claim that can be made today is narrower than the headlines: a text sealed in AD 79 has been read without breaking it, and the same method can now be tried on every roll that was left intact.

Key facts

Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79 and buried Herculaneum under roughly twenty meters of volcanic material, against about six at Pompeii.
Bourbon workmen found the Villa of the Papyri in 1752; more than 1,000 carbonized papyrus rolls survive.
Most identified texts are Greek Epicurean works, many by Philodemus of Gadara.
Antonio Piaggio’s unrolling machine (1750s) and later mechanical methods destroyed much of what they opened.
X-ray CT plus machine-learning ink detection, developed at the University of Kentucky, reads rolls without unrolling them.
The first complete word from an unopened scroll was read in October 2023; more than 2,000 characters were recovered by February 2024.

FAQ

What are the Herculaneum scrolls?

Carbonized papyrus rolls, mostly Greek philosophical texts, found in 1752 in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. They were buried and baked by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79.

How can a scroll be read without opening it?

The roll is scanned with X-ray CT, software flattens the wound layers into a virtual sheet, and a machine-learning model detects the faint texture the ink left on the papyrus.

What was the Vesuvius Challenge?

A prize competition launched in 2023 that released scans of unopened rolls and rewarded the first readable text. A student read the first word in October 2023; a team recovered more than 2,000 characters by February 2024.

Why are the scrolls black and brittle?

The heat of the eruption carbonized the papyrus. Carbon does not rot, which is why the rolls survived, but it shatters when bent.

Why did Herculaneum survive better than Pompeii?

It was buried three times deeper, under material that set hard, and the heat carbonized organic objects instead of burning them away.

Sources

Cite this article

APA: Our Earth's History. (2026, September 19). How Do You Read a 2,000-Year-Old Book Too Fragile to Open? Our Earth's History. https://ourearthshistory.com/europe/classical/reading-herculaneum-scrolls-without-opening/
Chicago: Our Earth's History. “How Do You Read a 2,000-Year-Old Book Too Fragile to Open?” Our Earth's History, September 19, 2026. https://ourearthshistory.com/europe/classical/reading-herculaneum-scrolls-without-opening/.
MLA: “How Do You Read a 2,000-Year-Old Book Too Fragile to Open?” Our Earth's History, 19 Sep. 2026, https://ourearthshistory.com/europe/classical/reading-herculaneum-scrolls-without-opening/.

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