Cultural History

In the 1,800-year-old letter, written mainly in Greek, the soldier serving in a Roman legion in Europe tells his family he is desperate to hear from them and that he is going to request leave to make the long journey home to see them.

Researchers began decoding the glyphic language of the ancient Maya long ago, but the Internet is helping them finish the job and write the history of the enigmatic Mesoamerican civilization.

For centuries, scholars understood little about Maya script beyond its elegant astronomical calculations and calendar. The Maya dominated much of Central America and southern Mexico for 1,000 years before their civilization collapsed about 600 years before the Spaniards reached the New World.

The Maya script began to give up its secrets in the 1950s and ’60s, and progress accelerated in the 1970s. But much remains to be puzzled out from the immense body of carvings and inscriptions that has languished for centuries in jungle ruins and museum closets.

Enter University of Texas archaeologist David Stuart, one of the world’s leading experts on Maya script.

“I had all these boxes of notes and papers in my office, and I was never going to publish every little observation,” he said. “But I thought that if I had a blog, I could talk about new things and bring out some old stuff from my dusty files.”

So five years ago, Stuart started up Maya Decipherment, a blog for scholars and amateurs to post new inscriptions, refine translations and debate the subtleties of Maya language, all in an effort to fill out the history of the civilization.

The work will take years, but with the help of the Internet, the pace is quicker than it has ever been

Newly-discovered food recipes from a 12th century Durham Priory manuscript have been found to pre-date the earliest known ones by 150 years. The recipes are to be recreated at a Durham University event later in the month.

The Latin manuscript mainly consists of recipes for medical ointments and cures and was compiled and written at Durham Cathedral’s priory around 1140. The work was recently been re-examined and found to contain the food recipes, which experts believe are amongst the oldest in the western medieval culinary tradition, preceding the previously known examples from circa 1290. The manuscript is now held at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University.

Panels from a seaside mansion at Herculaneum, which like Pompeii was overwhelmed by Vesuvius in AD79, go on display