The Scroll Nobody Could Open: AI Ink Detectives Find Hidden Letters

The story

A volcano baked a scroll into charcoal almost 2,000 years ago, and it's been too fragile to unroll ever since. On October 8, 2026, the Vesuvius Challenge awarded its $50,000 First Letters Prize to Erwin Nieuwlaar, a software engineer from the Netherlands. He found the first readable letters ever seen inside that scroll, PHerc. 343. It's about 14 cm long and kept at the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli in Naples, Italy.

Here's how he did it:

He traced one layer of the rolled papyrus inside an X-ray scan, using the challenge's open-source spiral-fitter plus his own way of snapping it tightly to the surface.

He ran four AI ink-detection models (one is named Hecate) and averaged their answers. None of the models had been trained on this scroll, so they were "generalising across scrolls."

Papyrologists, who are experts in reading ancient papyrus, read the Greek letters as part of the phrase "everything that happens."

Other teams found the letters μουσικ (mousik), which may point to a word about music.

Wow picture

A burnt black "marshmallow log" a little shorter than a pencil. Deep inside it, glowing yellow letters light up on a computer screen without anyone unrolling a single layer. Erwin shouted, in Dutch, "Dit is toch gewoon inkt!" ("This is surely just ink!").

How the AI learned (kid version)

The ink detectives practiced like you learning to ride a bike. They made a guess ("ink here, no ink there"), got a score, adjusted, and tried again, thousands of times. They practiced on other scrolls and still recognized ink in this new one, the way you can ride at the park after learning in the driveway.

AI as a coach, not a copy machine