Saturday, February 8, 2014

Ancient Lives

Sure, you've got time on your hands--even in California, it's still winter. Or, more accurately, suddenly winter. So what better thing to do than to head over to Ancient Lives and help transcribe a few papyri? When you get to the sight you can click explore or above where it says transcribe. You don't have to know any ancient languages either. I believe that it is sort of a crowd sourcing model, where a lot of people make their best guess and this helps them with the answer. A fascinating idea, and probably at least as entertaining as solitaire. 

18 comments:

  1. I think one of those lines translates as, "If you lived in this period, you'd be home now."

    ReplyDelete
  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I peered at a bit of cuneiform on Sunday, I thought briefly it would be fun to be able to read that stuff.

    ReplyDelete
  4. It would be. Helping someone else dcipher it might be a nice second best, though.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I probably have access to that knowledge close to home, at the University of Pennsylvania Museum.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I don't think UCSC has much in the way of papyri, as it doesn't even have a museum. But I'm sure there is some in many spots of the greater Bay Area here.

    ReplyDelete
  7. You know, I wonder about that. So much depends on what fields of scholarship and areas of artistic taste were in vogue when money accumulates in the hands of collectors in a given area.

    I was browsing the Internet for translations of and information about Virgil's Georgics and Aeneid this evening, and I came across an introduction that had been written by someone from Santa Cruz.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I don't remember. I see now that he is a big man on the Georgics, but I browsed quite a number of editions. I don't remember if his name was the one I noticed.

    I have a colleague named Gary Miles, but he knows no Latin as far as I know.

    ReplyDelete
  9. He was my college core course professor, and remains a friend to this day. I remember sitting for a meal with him in the Cowell dining hall and talking with him about his work on the Georgics way back when. Unfortunately, I am not much of a Roman history buff, and I haven't read Virgil.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Until yesterday, I had read no Virgil beyond the first line of the Aenied, But I always like the idea of the Georgics. Who today can imagine a poem about agriculture (and apiculture, too, as I found out). I especially like the first line in the translation by one Peter Fallon:

    "What tickles the corn to laugh out loud ..."

    ReplyDelete
  11. Yes, though I have to admit that I did not find the idea of poetry about agriculture that scintillating at the time. But Wendell Berry would approve.

    ReplyDelete
  12. But how can you resist corn smiling, or even laughing?

    ReplyDelete
  13. Well, I am not a big fan of corn. But also, I can't quite visualize that image.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Part of the reason it's so striking. Perhaps you could investigate the words Virgil chose in the original Latin.

    One translation gives the crop as wheat, which opens up the vexed corn/maize question.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Not to mention the vexed corn maze question. I walked through one of these once, or think I did.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Blogger must like corn; it's eating my comments again.

    Intended comment: In such a maze, you must have been up to your ears.

    ReplyDelete