AI ink detection let papyrologists read the first Greek words in Herculaneum scroll PHerc. 306B: “that which is in itself desirable”

Liam Warner, a freelance software engineer in northern England, and Nicola Bodill, a Sydney MA student, combined two AI ink-detection models on a CT scan of PHerc. 306B, a scroll carbonised by Vesuvius in AD 79. Vesuvius Challenge papyrologists agreed on the letters and read a likely phrase, “that which is in itself desirable.” The pair won a $50,000 prize and published their code, model and data.

In AD 79, Mount Vesuvius buried the scrolls of a villa at Herculaneum. One of them, PHerc. 306, was dug out in the 1750s and is now in two charred pieces. It now sits in Naples’ national library. It was micro-CT scanned last year, and until this month no one had read anything written inside it.

The clever bit

Liam Warner, a freelance software engineer from northern England, had a spare RTX 4090 graphics card doing nothing much, so he tried ink detection. He virtually peeled one sheet from deep inside the 3D scan and ran two AI ink models over it: TRACE v3B, a public model, and one he and Nicola Bodill fine-tuned. They multiplied the two outputs, so a spot shows dark only where both models see ink. Bodill, who studied Latin and Ancient Greek and is now an MA student at the University of Sydney, has spent hundreds of hours hand-labelling ink to train models like these.

Several entrants had already found the letters τοδιαυτο, but what came after looked like either an M or an N. In Warner and Bodill’s image a faint diagonal stroke showed up, matching the alpha before it, and for the first time the papyrology team agreed on the reading αι. That makes τὸ δι᾽ αὑτὸ αἱρετόν, “that which is in itself desirable,” very plausible, a phrase with parallels in Aristotle and the Epicurean Philodemus. Out of 25 submissions on this scroll, theirs won the $50,000 First Letters Prize.

Each new letter saved from the ‘innumerabilis annorum series et fuga temporum’ (’innumerable series of years and flight of time’) is precious, so it’s very exciting and meaningful work, if often painstakingly slow.

— Nicola Bodill, papyrologist on the winning team and MA student at the University of Sydney, via scrollprize.substack.com

Hooray

A scroll nobody can open has given up its first readable words in about 2,000 years. The ink also showed which way the script runs, so 306B turns out to be the upper part of the original scroll, and the smaller piece, 306A, is now more worth scanning. Warner and Bodill published their code, weights and data for anyone to check.

What comes next

Two short lines are far from a whole book, and the author is still unknown. The Vesuvius Challenge says 20 more scanned scrolls are eligible for First Letters prizes, and PHerc. 306B is now a front-runner for its $800,000 Grand Prize for reading 70% of a scroll with minimal human input.

How solid is it?

Promising: Results measured in a study or bounded trial. Limitations and wider testing still matter.

Expert-reviewed result, not peer reviewed. The Vesuvius Challenge papyrology team reviewed 25 submissions on this scroll and, for the first time, agreed on the disputed letters in Warner and Bodill’s image before awarding the First Letters Prize on November 2, 2026. The team’s public repository reports its own checks: shuffling the CT depth layers makes the letters vanish, and on held-out known text from another scroll the ink model scored AUC 0.874. Code, weights, data and a Docker rebuild are public.

See for yourself.

Selected for Nov 7, 2026. Reviewed Nov 7, 2026, 6:00 AM MT. Source dates may be earlier than this edition.