Crowdsourcing Ancient Egyptian Scrolls 94
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!"
Re:I'm disappointed (Score:5, Interesting)
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.