PHerc. Paris. 4

The Villa of the Papyri was buried during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, subjecting the scrolls to temperatures of 310–320 °C, compacting them and converting them to charcoal.

They were a diplomatic gift, made to commemorate peace between the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily, under the reign of Ferdinand IV and Napoleon, with the negotiations mediated by Charles Alquier.

[1] In 1803, a tribute of vases and the scrolls arrived in France under the supervision of Francesco Carelli and was personally exhibited to Napoleon and Joséphine whereupon they entered the collection of the Institut.

1 having a history of successful limited readings in 1986–1987, with sequences of letters such as "ΠIΠTOIE" and words such as "EIΠOI" (Greek: "would say") proving decipherable.

[2] After the virtual unrolling of the En-Gedi Scroll in 2015, Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, spearheaded the effort to uncover the Herculaneum corpus through non-invasive means.

[3][4] On 15 March 2023, Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub, and Daniel Gross of Cue, upon hearing a lecture by Seales, launched the Vesuvius Challenge to utilize machine learning and new imaging techniques of the papyri using the Diamond Light Source particle accelerator to create an improved scan of the PHerc.

[8][5] Seales described of the decades of work in non-invasive decipherment that "[w]ith humility, we acknowledge the non-linear – and often unpredictable – outcomes of research, which is rarely expected, and not ever guaranteed, to lead directly to success".

[8] In an interview with Time, Nat Friedman described the contents of the scroll as "a 2000 year old blog post, arguing with another poster", and "it's ancient Substack, and people are beefing with each other, and I think that's just amazing".

[10] The goal of the Vesuvius Challenge for 2024 is towards deciphering 90% of the scroll's contents in addition to other fragments held by the Institut de France.