Society and Culture: Oxford asks volunteers to decipher the Oxyrhynchus Papyri

The University of Oxford is calling to volunteers to take part in deciphering of legendary antique Oxyrhynchus Papyri found in Egypt. Some 200,000 segments of ancient texts were uploaded on Internet by the university. Specialists claim that they contain among others fragments of Biblical apocrypha with narrations on the earthly ministry of Jesus the Christ.

To translate the texts there is no need to know ancient Greek language. The point is that the website offers a special software that recognizes letters and signs and then translates them. However often the text can be hardly deciphered due to the handwriting style or its bad state. The project is thus looking for people across the world to help translate the ancient documents because the task is too big for the research team of the University of Oxford.

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri were discovered by British scholars in the end 19th c. by archaeologists in Oxyrhynchus 160 km south of Cairo. Dry climate favored the preservation of a large number of ancient written documents dated 1st-4th cc. AD. The most part of the papyri was moved to England and donated to the University of Oxford. Those documents featured unknown works by Sophocles, Euripides, Titus Livius, and also numerous early Christian texts, including non-canonical Gospel of Thomas.