Slashdot Mirror
Crowdsourcing Ancient Egyptian Scrolls
An anonymous reader writes "Dons at Oxford University were on the BBC Radio 4 'Today' program this morning asking for help from listeners to transcribe unearthed ancient Egyptian texts and scrolls via their website. Visitors to the site are asked to match-up letters on scanned fragments of papyrus with an on-screen Greek alphabet. By doing so, they can help reveal some of the amazing documents that the ancient Egyptians last read. You too can become a papyrologist!"
Greek? You expect me to help translate Ptolemaic period shit?!?!? Do I *look* like Alexander the Fucking Great to you?
You want my help, you better throw down some hieroglyphs, bitch!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
No thanks. I hear those Egyptian curses are nasty, and are acquired by simply reading something or breaking a seal.
You're trying to be silly, but that kind of information would be useful:
- If I have a bunch of people's shopping lists, I'd be able to tell what sort of things were commonly eaten in that society.
- Based on how many other people had those foods on the list, I'd likely be able to get an idea as to what's considered rare delicacies versus what's common food (e.g. caviar versus ground beef).
- Especially combining that information with where the document was found, I'd have a good chance of linking menus to social classes.
- Once I've got an idea of which social classes have these documents and which don't, I'd know how widespread literacy was in that society, whether there were only professional scribes or amateur writers as well, and maybe some sense of how integrated the scribes were with the rest of the society.
I mean, imagine you're an archaeologist from the year 3000 trying to figure out why this "pizza" stuff was so wildly popular in ancient New York. Suddenly the nutritional information on the back of a pepperoni wrapper is vitally important.
I am officially gone from
As a late antique historian, I have to point out (to defend our territory, and, at the same time, avoid offending historians of an earlier period) that these are not "ancient Egyptian" in the sense most people mean. These are very late antique. I am glad to see a project like this, however. It's because of mundane papyrus stashes like these that we know more about daily life in Egypt, and Alexandria in particular, than any other area in late antiquity. For those who might be interested in the subject, I recommend R. Bagnall, Egypt in Late Antiquity (1993), C. Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity (1997), and the recent Egypt in the Byzantine World, 300-700, edited by Bagnall (2007), as some great places to start.
That information failed to meet the notability guidelines and was deleted per the official deletion policy. Backups from that time period were written over a short time later under the assumption that the information would no longer be needed. Later attempts to put the information back were prevented due to the no original research policy and an ill-informed admin with a grudge who wouldn't allow the information, citing the sources being used were unreliable and could not be verified.