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Jul 27, 2011

Translating Ancient Egyptian Texts Just Went Social

You know you wanna be like Indiana Jones, unlocking the secrets of ancient manuscripts. Well, that is hard. But the Egypt Exploration Society and Oxford University are giving you the chance by uploading their ancient papyrus to the web.

By visiting Oxford's Ancient Lives website, you and your fellow archaeologists can sit down and attempt to decipher the cataloged papyri from Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus, discovered in the late 19th century. The find includes accounts of everyday life, an apocryphal gospel, and literature. You may want to go through the tutorial first, though. Or learn some Greek.
 
 

8 comments:

Zombie said...

so if this is the new hip thing now, does that make Indiana Jones a hipster?

Dylanthulhu said...

This kind of reminds me of that program where you use your PC spare CPU cycles to decode data from outer space to search for alien transmissions.SETI@home. There we go.

Homura said...

Oh wow!

my day in a sentence said...

This is really cool.
Making this thing public can really just help.
And I believe there are people that are born with the talent to break the code, without being archaeologists.

Justin said...

oh nice i wouldn't mind getting together with my college friends and trying some of this out!

Sub Radar (Mike) said...

Hmm, since it's the internet, wouldn't be surprised if someone translated it and everyone said "cool story bro"

msmariah said...

Very cool. I want one.

Gryt said...

Thats pretty crazy. I don't want to bother learning Egyptian though, I'm already still learning Latin, and funnily enough starting Greek. Yay for classical languages.