On 7 September 2026, we detected ink revealing the first traces of letters in PHerc1447, a Herculaneum papyrus scroll carbonized nearly 2,000 years ago. It was the first scroll in which our team uncovered ink hidden since antiquity. Today, we are sharing that discovery publicly.
The research was carried out by the Grilli Security research team, led by Leonel Wainer.
Reading a carbonized scroll
The Herculaneum scrolls were buried and carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. Their survival has made it possible to investigate ancient writing that remained hidden inside them for centuries.
The discovery and its acknowledgment
On 11 September 2026, we submitted the result to the Vesuvius Challenge’s First Letters Prize. The competition’s team lead confirmed that it did not yet contain ten sufficiently legible letters.
On 24 September, ScrollPrize decided to withdraw the First Letters Prize for PHerc1447.
We kept the finding confidential in accordance with the competition’s publication rules. We can now share it publicly.
On 12 October, the Vesuvius Challenge team acknowledged our PHerc1447 ink detection as the first of its kind known to them, as recorded in the message below.
From PHerc1447 to PHerc0306B
The work on PHerc1447 laid the foundation for the eight-letter result in PHerc0306B that we are also announcing today. It is the second scroll in which our team has uncovered ink hidden since antiquity.
A technical account is coming
A detailed technical write-up is coming. It will trace the work from PHerc1447 to PHerc0306B and explain our methods, how we used LLMs, and the evidence behind both results.
Grilli Security works in offensive security and frontier AI research. We develop original methods and technologies, and this blog is where we will publish our experiments, findings, and technical accounts for others to examine and build upon.
Acknowledgments
We thank the Vesuvius Challenge community, the institutions preserving the Herculaneum papyri, and the researchers who made this work possible. Our work uses the Vesuvius Challenge — CT Scans of Herculaneum Papyri dataset and builds on the research and software made available by the community.