Vesuvius Challenge

Resurrect an ancient library from the ashes of a volcano.

Win Prizes.  Make History. 

What We're Building Towards

In Herculaneum, twenty meters of hot mud and ash bury an enormous villa once owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar. Inside, there is a vast library of papyrus scrolls.

The scrolls are carbonized by the heat of the volcanic debris. But they are also preserved. For centuries, as virtually every ancient text exposed to the air decays and disappears, the library of the Villa of the Papyri waits underground, intact.

While digging a well, an Italian farmworker encounters a marble pavement. Excavations unearth beautiful statues and frescoes – and hundreds of scrolls. Carbonized and ashen, they are extremely fragile. But the temptation to open them is great; if read, they would significantly increase the corpus of literature we have from antiquity.

Early attempts to open the scrolls unfortunately destroy many of them. A few are painstakingly unrolled by a monk over several decades, and they are found to contain philosophical texts written in Greek. More than six hundred remain unopened and unreadable.

Using X-ray tomography and computer vision, a team led by Dr. Brent Seales at the University of Kentucky reads the En-Gedi scroll without opening it. Discovered in the Dead Sea region of Israel, the scroll is found to contain text from the book of Leviticus.

Virtual unwrapping has since emerged as a growing field with multiple successes. Their work went on to show the elusive carbon ink of the Herculaneum scrolls can also be detected using X-ray tomography, laying the foundation for Vesuvius Challenge.

Vesuvius Challenge was launched in March 2023 to bring the world together to read the Herculaneum scrolls. Along with smaller progress prizes, a Grand Prize was issued for the first team to recover 4 passages of 140 characters from a Herculaneum scroll.

A widespread community effort builds on the success of the first scroll, automating and refining the components of the virtual unwrapping pipeline. Efforts to scan and read multiple scrolls are underway. New text is revealed from another scroll.

2026 AD
The Challenge Continues​

Vesuvius Challenge moves onto its next stage of reading multiple entire scrolls. Read more about the prizes below, and on how they contribute towards the The Master Plan.

Awarded Prizes​

Incredible teams of engineers are helping us unlock these secrets, providing unprecedented access to scrolls that have not been read in two millennia. Learn more about their accomplishments.

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Caesars

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