Ancient papyrus text PHerc. 306B read for first time in 2000 years
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The gist
Liam Warner and Nicola Bodill won a $50,000 First Letters Prize for recovering readable text from PHerc. 306B.
The scroll was buried by Vesuvius in AD79 and now yields writing again.
Background
PHerc. 306 is one of the Herculaneum papyri, scrolls buried in the ruins of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD79 and subjected them to extreme temperatures. The scroll, now held at the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli (Naples' national library), was excavated in the 1750s and is broken into two parts, PHerc. 306A and PHerc. 306B. The Vesuvius Challenge is the prize organization that reviewed 25 community submissions on the scroll and awarded the $50,000 First Letters Prize for revealing ink and recovering readable text.
How it unfolded
- AD79PHerc. 306 is buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
- 1750sThe scroll is excavated.
- last yearPHerc. 306 is micro-CT scanned.
- recentlyThe sequence τοδιαυτο is identified in multiple submissions for almost a month, but what follows stays too faint for the papyrology team to agree on.
- recentlyA subtle improvement in readability in Liam Warner and Nicola Bodill's image lets the papyrology team agree on the reading of αι for the first time.
- recentlyAfter reviewing 25 submissions, the Vesuvius Challenge awards the $50,000 First Letters Prize on PHerc. 306B to Warner and Bodill.
- Nov 3, 2026A post reports that writing has been seen in PHerc. 306B for the first time in 2000 years.
Who’s saying what
- Official
- Vesuvius Challenge's Paul Henderson and Federica Nicolardi said this scroll was a challenging one and congratulated Warner and Bodill for revealing ink and recovering readable text.
- Official
- The Vesuvius Challenge also acknowledged the other contestants who worked on the same segment and came close to the target before the winning submission.
Still unverified
The Vesuvius Challenge said the sequence τοδιαυτο had been identified in multiple submissions for almost a month, but what followed was too faint for consensus, with traces interpreted as either a mu or a nu.