For the first time in two thousand years, words written on a carbonised scroll from Herculaneum have been read. The fragment, PHerc. 306B, was buried by the 79 AD eruption of Vesuvius, unearthed in 1750, and micro-CT scanned last year, but no one had yet deciphered its contents. The recognition went to Liam Warner and Nicola Bodill, who revealed the ink and recovered readable text, winning a $50,000 prize awarded by the Vesuvius Challenge.
PHerc. 306 is split into two parts, 306A and 306B. For a long time it was unclear which corresponded to the upper section of the original roll. Identifying the ink and the orientation of the script established that 306B is the upper part, while the smaller 306A is the lower. The roll now sits about 10 kilometres from where it was found, in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum.
Judging the entries was not straightforward. Several participants identified the same area of the roll, and some came close to the required threshold of 10 readable characters within 4 square centimetres, recovering sequences of 7, 8 or 9 characters.
Image: scrollprize.org — https://scrollprize.org/data_browser/PHercParis1Fr34
The breakthrough came with a sequence, τοδιαυτο, identified by several participants for almost a month but too uncertain for the papyrology team to agree on. The traces that followed could be read as either mu or nu. In Warner and Bodill's work, a subtle but decisive gain in legibility revealed a diagonal stroke, and for the first time the team agreed on the reading αι. Palaeographically this matters: in majuscule script Μ, Ν and ΑΙ look very alike, and confusion among these forms was common even in antiquity during manuscript copying.
With that reading the text becomes τὸ δι᾽ αὑτὸ αἱρετόν, "that which is desirable in itself". The phrase has parallels in philosophical treatises such as those of Aristotle and Sextus Empiricus, and appears in Philodemus' ethical treatise On Anger, where it criticises those who regard punishment as a good in itself. In an Epicurean context, however, the expression should refer only to good and pleasure.
The two winners worked differently. Warner is a freelance software engineer from northern England who put a spare RTX 4090 to work on ink detection. Bodill, from Australia, holds a degree in Latin and Ancient Greek and is working on a critical edition of a Gandharan Buddhist birch-bark manuscript. Since 2023 she has studied the virtually unrolled scrolls and hand-made hundreds of ink labels to train models. Warner credited the result to both of them, while Bodill thanked the Vesuvius Challenge community.
The result does not yet open a full text: it is an isolated phrase whose reading still needs philological confirmation. But it shows that even the most distorted scrolls can yield words, and that research on the Herculaneum papyri can now proceed on firmer footing.
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