If you're already an ancient history fanatic, you'll already have heard of Oxyrhynchus. It's a small town in Egypt where vast numbers of Roman-period papyri, mostly in Greek, have been excavated. The site has turned up everything from fragments of lost works of literature to everyday administrative documents, and even an early Christian "lost gospel". The problem is that there are so many texts that they are swamping papyrologists, meaning that it is taking decades and decades to get them all transcribed and translated.
If you've ever fancied helping out with real ancient history, the online "Ancient Lives" project may just be for you. On the site, you will be presented with papyrus fragments and asked to "transcribe" them on a Greek keyboard panel. You don't need to know any Greek to do it (it's just a case of matching symbols), and it's curiously satisfying. You may never get to find out what the texts you are transcribing actually mean, but you can feel good in the knowledge that you have made a contribution to the serious academic study of Roman and Egyptian history, and have helped experts shed a little light on a previously unknown bit of the ancient world.
Anyway, it's a very constructive activity to while away a spare 15 minutes or so, and as I said there's a strange satisfaction to the process. "Ancient Lives" can be visited at the following website:
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