Vesuvius Challenge awards $50K for first text read from a still-rolled scroll

$50k First Letters Prize Awarded for PHerc 343

Erwin Nieuwlaar, a freelance software engineer from the Netherlands, won the $50K First Letters Prize for extracting readable Greek from PHerc. 343, a carbonized scroll buried in AD 79. Using the Vesuvius Challenge's open-source spiral-fitter and four existing ink-detection models, he found the sequence παντογινομ, likely part of the phrase 'everything that happens.' The models were not trained on this scroll, showing they generalize across papyri.