Ancient documents go digital at Duke -- glimpses of a distant past, so different yet so similar!

Technology and crowdsourcing efforts continue to really benefit genealogists and historians.

Recent efforts at Duke University are allowing documents from thousands of years ago to become available to not just scholars and everyone.  The first step was the digitization of Duke’s collection of papyrus fragments.  The second and current step is the transcribing (and translating) of these fragments from Greek into English.  If you know Greek, you can help.

Read more about the project (and do watch the video).

Access the Duke Papyrus Archive.

I was struck by Duke University professor Josh Sosin’s comments that in essence these are fascinating for the glimpse they give into life thousands of years ago, in some ways so different from our lives today and yet also so similar.

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