Much of our understanding of history comes from reading ancient texts. Contrary to what you might think, we have actually recovered a vast number of documents from the past. Our progress in learning from them, however, has been very slow, for several reasons. There are relatively few trained scholars, funding can be hard to come by, and of course the ancient texts themselves must be handled as little as possible, and very carefully stored.
Researchers with the University of Oxford have found a way to speed up the process. The Ancient Lives project has produced digital images of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri collection and posted them online. Using a special interface, you can help measure and transcribe the documents, even if you don’t understand the language itself (although it might be cool to learn).
The documents might include texts, letters, receipts, or accounts. In some cases, you may see an entire papyrus, and in other cases you might see only a fragment. This particular collection was originally found in an ancient rubbish dump near modern-day el-Bahnasa, by Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt around the end of the 1800s. It is known to contain some of the oldest known copies of the New Testament and the Septuagint, and the poems of poems of Pindar, fragments of Sappho and Alcaeus.
A careful transcription of all of this material will help us learn more about the lives and culture of Greco-Roman Egypt, and give us a firmer understanding of how our ancestors lived.