It’s a rare life to be a Classics don, and now you can try your hand at it. The process is remarkably simple: go to Oxford University’s Ancient Lives website, where the university’s enormous archive of ancient manuscripts has been stored, and take a very quick tutorial.
After that, you will be presented with an untranslated fragment. You can read the letters or hieroglyphs by matching them up with those contained in a transliteration tool situated beneath the fragment; you can also measure papyri using a simple scrolling tool. The aim is to discover if the document has been translated by an academic. If it has been, then you can read it and work out what the ancient symbols signify; if it has not been translated, then your transcribed fragment will be sent to a Don, who will translate it for you and for posterity.
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