The First Readable Letters Return From a Scroll Vesuvius Buried in AD 79

“Everything that happens.” Those are the first words anyone has read in PHerc. 343 since Mount Vesuvius buried it in AD 79, if most of the Vesuvius Challenge’s papyrologists are right about the phrase. For nearly two thousand years the scroll has been a lump of carbon about 14 centimeters long, kept at the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli. It has never been unrolled, because unrolling it would destroy it.

So whoever wrote it has been silent all that time. On October 8, 2026, the challenge announced that a few words inside can now be read. Erwin Nieuwlaar, a freelance software engineer from the Netherlands, won the project’s $50,000 First Letters Prize for making the ink visible, and the challenge’s papyrologists read what he brought out.

Getting a voice back from a sealed scroll took a relay of people and tools, and each handoff matters.

Nieuwlaar went first. Inside an 8.64 micrometer X-ray scan, he traced the surface of a single layer of the rolled papyrus, using the challenge’s open-source spiral-fitter and his own method for snapping segments tightly to the surface.

Then the models took the baton. Carbon ink on carbonized papyrus is nearly invisible in X-ray data, so the challenge relies on machine learning models trained to pick it out. Nieuwlaar ran four existing ink-detection models over his segment and averaged their output. One was his own fine-tune, trained on a different scroll, PHerc. 0139. None of the four had ever been trained on PHerc. 343. In the organizers’ words, the models are generalizing across scrolls, which is the quietly hopeful part: each new scroll no longer has to start from zero.

Finally, people did the reading. Nieuwlaar’s submission was the first to meet the challenge’s strict technical and papyrological bar, 10 readable letters in 4 square centimeters. The segment shows parts of four lines of Greek. The third is the clearest, and the papyrologists read it as πα̣ντ̣ογιν̣ομ̣ followed by one noisier character. According to most of them, those letters belong to the phrase πᾶ̣ν τ̣ὸ γιν̣όμ̣ε̣[νον, meaning “everything that happens” or “everything that is generated.”

Other voices are stirring in the same scroll. In text from Ben Kyles and colleagues, who worked on a different area, the papyrologists found a participle of a Greek verb meaning “bring to completion,” followed by the clear letters μουϲικ, which suggest a reference to music. They now wonder whether the letters μουϲ, seen in a segment from Gabriel Munoz Mendonca, belong to a similar word. Music, in a book nobody has opened since the eruption, is a lovely thing to glimpse.

Nieuwlaar put his reason for doing this plainly:

“I really love the challenge, for me it is not a hobby but an obsession.” Erwin Nieuwlaar, in the Vesuvius Challenge prize announcement

What makes this matter beyond one phrase is that the whole effort is open. Anyone can reproduce his result from the code and instructions he posted on GitHub. On June 25, 2026, the team announced it had virtually unwrapped another scroll, PHerc. 1667, and read its surviving text from beginning to end, about 1.4 meters of papyrus and roughly 22 columns of Greek, described in a preprint on arXiv with the scans, data and code public. In July the organizers opened a new prize pool of more than $2 million, aimed at making the rest of the collection readable with far less human effort.

Honesty about where this stands: it is a few letters from one small segment, checked by papyrologists but not yet published in a peer-reviewed edition. Nobody knows who wrote PHerc. 343 or what it is about. But the next reader of this scroll does not have to be a specialist with a lab. It could be anyone with the patience to follow the published instructions, run the code and hand what they find to the people who can read Greek.