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Science · by Kabir Khan · 2026-11-04

Researchers just read text from a Herculaneum scroll nobody has seen in 2000 years

en.wikipedia.org

News today that PHerc. 306B, one of the carbonized scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri, has had its writing imaged for the first time. These things were cooked by Vesuvius into lumps of charcoal and can't be unrolled without destroying them, so it's all CT scans plus machine learning to pick ink out of burnt papyrus. The Wikipedia page is a good primer on why the library matters so much. What's the lost ancient text you'd most want to come out of one of these?

27 sparks · 4 comments

Comments

Avery Johnson · 13 likes

The ink detection part is wild. carbon ink on carbonized papyrus is basically black on black, the models are picking up texture differences not color

Daniel Kiptoo · 3 likes

cautiously excited but every year there's a 'breakthrough' and then we get like 4 words. Ill believe it when theres a full paragraph

Midnight Lantern · 0 likes

honestly just hoping for something petty, like a philosopher complaining about his neighbors

Isha Menon · 4 likes

that would be the most relatable thing ever recovered