Lost books by ancient philosophers recovered from ‘unreadable’ scrolls.

Hayley Bennett   New Scientist25 June 2026
Long-lost works of ancient philosophy have been recovered from papyrus scrolls, scorched in the Roman library of Herculaneum by the 79 CE eruption of Mount Vesuvius, thought to be impossible to read.

For the first time, researchers have used AI to extract the entire surviving text from super-high-resolution 3D scans of a scroll without unrolling it.