$50k First Letters Prize Awarded for PHerc 343

A $50,000 First Letters Prize was awarded to Erwin Nieuwlaar for detecting the first readable text recovered from PHerc. 343, a carbonised Herculaneum scroll still rolled since AD 79. The submitted segment spans four partial lines and meets the competition’s technical threshold of at least ten readable characters in 4 cm²; the clearest line yields the sequence ΠΑ̣ΝΤ̣ΟΓΙΝ̣ΟΜ̣, which papyrologists render as ΠΑ̣͂Ν Τ̣Ὸ ΓΙΝ̣ΌΜ̣Ε̣ ΝΟΝ, a phrase meaning “everything that happens/is generated.” Nieuwlaar traced the scroll surface using an adapted open-source spiral-fitter on an 8.64 µm CT scan, snapped segments to the papyrus mesh across windings w047-w048, and averaged four independent 9 µm ink-detection models (including ink_9um, Hecate, and a fine-tune called dense_native) to produce the highlighted ink image; the pipeline and instructions are publicly available for reproduction.

Other teams submitted promising fragments from PHerc. 343: Gabriel Munoz Mendonca reported ΘΕΝ and ΜΟΥϹ sequences, while Ben Kyles and colleagues, using a different unwrapping pipeline (ScrollFiesta), detected a string interpretable as a participle of ἐξεργάζομαι plus the letters ΜΟΥϹΙΚ, pointing to music-related vocabulary that resonates with Philodemus’ treatise On Music found elsewhere among the papyri. Nieuwlaar, a freelance Dutch software engineer who began by fixing bugs and invested in GPU time to train models, attributes his success to persistent tinkering and the supportive Vesuvius Challenge community; the contest continues to spur open-science efforts to read more of these scrolls.