The Herculaneum scrolls that survived the destruction of Pompeii did so only by becoming too fragile to open. To read one was to destroy it.

This week, for the first time, that conundrum was solved.

The Vesuvius Challenge launched in March 2023 with an impossible goal: read the sealed scrolls without touching them. The technique they invented to do this was crazy:

• Fire X-rays through the carbonised papyrus at a particle accelerator in France, generating up to 300 terabytes of data per scroll.

• Train a machine learning model to detect ancient ink that is almost indistinguishable from the charred material surrounding it.

• Geometrically reconstruct the wound layers of papyrus inside each roll, then flatten them into a readable surface.

• Get ancient language experts and papyrologists to review every letter.

Three years later, they've finished their first, entire scroll: 22 columns of ancient Greek end to end, revealed for the first time in two millennia.

The text appears to be (of course) a Stoic work: it turns on human nature, impulse, and the moral progress of human beings, and its author is Aristocreon — nephew and disciple of the great Stoic Chrysippus — which, together with the language and themes, dates it to the 2nd century BC.

Because the papyrus is damaged, the readings are fragmentary, with gaps where the surface has been lost. Even so, several passages can be read clearly for the first time in 2,000 years.

“…we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature…”

“…such being the goods for us, even from the opposite evils there will be neither anything good — let alone beautiful — nor anything bad — let alone ugly — nor happiness…”

Hundreds more scrolls still to come…