Ancient Lives Project Needs Your Help

Become an armchair archaeologist.

In 1896, over 500,000 Greek text fragments known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri were discovered west of the Nile River. Part of a 2,000 year old city dump, these documents have offered a rare glimpse into everyday life in Egypt. However, 500k individual documents are hard to transcribe. That’s where you come in!

No knowledge of the language is needed. Merely the desire to help and an eye for puzzle matching games. The game is over here and like most good puzzle games, it’s easy to learn but hard to master. A scanned copy of one of the fragments will be pulled up with a keyboard. Your goal is to match as many of the symbols on the keyboard to the ones on papyrus. And just like that, you can tell your friends and family you can’t come to dinner because Oxford University needs your assistance translating anomalous ancient Greek text.

Source: ancientlives.org