This book has been rolled shut since 79 A.D. A college kid and an AI read it without opening it.

August 30, 2026

By Kim Komando

See that pic above? I took that when we were walking in Pompeii. I remember wondering how many fathers and sons walked that same path and what they talked about. 

I wonder if they were debating a book nobody has read since the Romans.

In 79 A.D., Vesuvius erupted and buried the town of Herculaneum under 60 feet of volcanic mud. In one seaside villa sat a library: about 1,800 papyrus scrolls, the only intact archive to survive from the ancient world. The heat didn’t burn the documents up. It turned them into lumps of charcoal, rolled shut.

🌋 Hot off the press

Workers dug them up in 1752. Then the damage started. People sliced them, soaked them, peeled them with a machine. Scroll after scroll crumbled into black flakes. The rule became simple: Don’t touch.

Enter Brent Seales, a University of Kentucky computer scientist, who spent 20 years on one idea. He argued that if you can’t open it, scan it. Put the scroll in a particle accelerator, X-ray it at the resolution of a few thousandths of a millimeter and virtually unroll it on a computer.

One problem. The ink is carbon. The papyrus is carbon. Under an X-ray, the writing is invisible.

🔍 Reading without looking

In 2023, Seales and two tech investors threw the scans online with $1 million in prize money and told the internet to figure it out. Thousands tried

The person who cracked it was Luke Farritor, a 21-year-old Nebraska student interning at SpaceX, who trained an AI to spot the faint texture that ink leaves on papyrus. The first word it found: ΠΟΡΦΥΡΑϹ. “Purple.”

By 2024, Farritor and two other students had pulled 2,000 characters off one scroll and split $700,000.

This June came the moment. 

Scroll PHerc. 1667, 4.6 feet long, read end to end. Twenty-two columns. It’s a Stoic treatise on ethics, human nature and how people can better their lives.

One line: “We will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves.”

Two thousand years buried, and the advice is “stay grounded.” Some things don’t need an update.

A year ago, it would have been “crazy” to believe a whole scroll could be read this way, Seales says. There are hundreds left in Naples, and for the first time, every one of them is a book instead of a briquette. Lost plays. Lost histories. Maybe the missing works of Aristotle. All waiting on a scan.

The world’s oldest unread library got a library card. Scroll with it.

🎯 Send this to someone who still owes you a book they borrowed. Two thousand years is the record.

📱 Text-worthy: Vesuvius turned 1,800 Roman scrolls into charcoal in 79 A.D. Every attempt to open one destroyed it. This June, scientists read an entire scroll without unrolling it, using particle accelerator X-rays plus an AI a 21-year-old trained to see invisible ink. Hundreds more are waiting.