This sounds crazy, BUT this week we READ A FULL SCROLL!! scrollprize.org/firstscroll It’s PHerc. 1667, aka Scroll 4! And that’s not all. We also proved that we can directly see ink in a rescan of PHerc. Paris 4 — Scroll 1 — WITHOUT machine learning… …and we UNROLLED ABOUT 140 COLUMNS FROM IT. This was honestly POETIC. We first saw a glimpse of the results over dinner in Naples, in a restaurant where Caravaggio was stabbed. Federica was so excited — more excited than we had ever seen her — that we abandoned dinner, went back to work, and unrolled the 140 columns until 3 a.m. on a hotel rooftop, with Vesuvius in the background. The unroll is not perfect. But guys… 140 columns, with text visible everywhere. It’s HUGE. This project has been full of ups and downs, but somehow, at some point, something ALWAYS happens. We’re starting to think these scrolls have personalities… …and they want to be read. @natfriedman has announced a $1M Grand Prize to read another full scroll. Official details coming soon!