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Bills... love letters... shopping lists... sound like the contents of your paper recycling bin? Guess what... things haven't changed much in two thousand years.
Step through the dingledoodlesquiggliedividerthingie fold...
Driving home after dropping the K's off at camp and Mr. Brillig at work, I was listening to the BBC News Hour and heard about a project aiming to translate thousands of papyrus fragments. A bit of Teh Google at home brought me to Oxford University's Ancient Lives project. According to the University website:
[They are] part of a treasure trove of papyri recovered in the early 20th century from the Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus, the ‘City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish’. The texts were written in Greek during a period when Egypt was under the control of a Greek (and later Roman) settler class. Many of the papyri had not been read for over a thousand years.
Because of the huge number of images involved researchers need volunteers to look through and catalogue them or transcribe the text using a simple web interface, which displays both known and unknown texts.
...
Experts have been studying the collection for over a hundred years. It is because of Oxyrhynchus that we now have lost masterpieces that went missing during the medieval period: the lost poetry of Sappho, the lost comedies of Menander and the lost plays of Sophocles. There are personal documents too – we learn from a letter that Aurelius the sausage-maker has taken out a loan of 9000 silver denarii, perhaps to expand his business, whilst in another letter of 127 AD a grandmother, called Sarapias, asks that her daughter is brought home so that she can be present at the birth of her grandchild.
I thought I can translate ancient gossip from a language I don't even read and be contributing to science?? Coool! So I went to the Ancient Lives site, clicked around a bit, and suddenly was looking at a two thousand year old fragment of papyrus that only a few people have looked at since then, matching the written Greek to a keyboard that showed examples of each letter. It was far more interesting than sudoku and many times more engaging than some other "Citizen Science" projects ie SETI (not that it's a bad thing, I just want to feel like I'm participating, yanno?).
I ran out of time to finish my assigned bit and get a translation; according to the website, per copyright I'd not have been allowed to post either pictures of the papyrus or the translation. I'll be sneaking back after TC quiets tonight, and I can see it becoming a rival to the Irritated Fowl for my disposable time :-). I hope you'll give it a look. Who knows, maybe one of the scraps holds the secret to achieving bipartisan compromise, or details how to lower debt without cutting services to the poor folk tasked with taking the recycling to the city dump.
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Brillig's ObDisclaimer: I try reeeeallllyy hard to publish everything without regard to content. I really do, even when I disagree personally with any given nomination. "TopCommentness" lies in the eye of the nominator, and you the reader. I do not publish self-nominations (ie your own comments) and if I ruled the world, we'd all uplift each other instead of tear each other down.
From kestrel9000:
In senilebiker's callout diary of the RKBA group, Shamash neatly destroys nine-tenths of the arguments used not just by the diarist himself, but by the majority of the gun control advocates on Daily Kos.
From lineatus:
In ectoras' great diary about the shootings in Norway and Glenn Beck's heinous response - chimpy tosses out a comment and K S LaVida hits it out of the park.
Time to start a new meme.
From HoundDog:
kurious made this great comment in my diary, that I would like to nominate. He vividly illustrates how important it is to maintain government spending, if we are going to maintain employment and stimulate consumer demand.
From smileycreek:
pixxer shows us a way to virtually hold hands with the Norwegian people at this website. [brillig's note: please note the link pixxer mentioned is from this fantastic diary ]
From Yours Truly, brillig:
From Meteor Blades' observation that Boehner lies, turnover lets us in on another surprising fact, which sets off a great chain of comments. UnaSpenser nailed it.