Ancient Lives - Papyrus transcription project

[Omni connexae!]

An unusual online project initiated by Oxford University (http://ancientlives.org/) has just started, and is appealing for volunteers to help transcribe ancient Papyri that were originally recovered from the Oxyrynchus site in the Egyptian desert between 1896 and 1907.

The Papyri are written in Greek and consist of a vast jumble of fragments of every imaginable type, including shopping lists, letters, poems, legal documents, works of philosophy and even fragments of early christian gospels. They were almost perfectly preserved in the dry desert air in the large municipal rubbish dumps of Oxyrhynchus.

Only about two percent of this corpus has ever been transcribed, but they have now been optically scanned and placed online, and amateur sleuths who enjoy pattern recognition and puzzle solving are invited to use the embedded transcription tools on the site. You don't need to be able to read or translate ancient Greek ! You simply need to be able to match shapes seen on the Papyrus to shapes on a virtual keyboard. Pattern recognition, document mapping and automatic translation tools do the rest.