Vesuvius Challenge: AI-Powered Herculaneum Scroll Recovery

Reading without physically unrolling

Vesuvius Challenge is an open-science research community launched in March 2023 by Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross and Brent Seales. Its work combines X-ray scanning with surface reconstruction, virtual unwrapping and machine-learning ink detection, followed by scholarly reading of the recovered writing. Funding sponsors and university affiliations do not establish ownership of the community. [1][2][3]

The June 25, 2026 PHerc. 1667 announcement described reading the surviving compact inner core from beginning to end. Earlier physical opening attempts had destroyed outer layers; the remaining papyrus preserves lower portions of roughly 22 columns, with gaps where material is lost. The achievement is a continuous reading of that surviving core, rather than recovery of every word on the original full-height scroll. [3]

The project publishes software and research resources, but their terms should be checked separately. The villa repository's root software license is MIT, while the website marks its content CC BY-NC 4.0 unless specified otherwise. Neither statement establishes one license for all scans, datasets and code distributed through the challenge. [4][1]