February 5, 2024

Farritor named co-winner of $700,000 prize for ID’ing scroll passages
Husker undergrad previously decoded first Greek word from ancient scroll

By Scott Schrage | University Communication and Marketing

In late 2023, Nebraska’s Luke Farritor became the first to free a Greek word from its prison: papyrus charred into a lump of carbon by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago.

That feat would earn Farritor worldwide acclaim and $40,000 from the organizers of the Vesuvius Challenge, a global effort to decode the writings of burnt scrolls recovered from a library in the Roman town of Herculaneum. For most, it would rank as the achievement of a lifetime.

But the Husker undergrad and Lincoln native was far from finished. On Feb. 5, the Vesuvius Challenge named Farritor, Youssef Nader and Julian Schilliger the co-winners of its $700,000 Grand Prize for deciphering at least four passages of text, each 140-plus characters long, from digital scans of a seared scroll.

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