Bernard p. Grenfell and Arthur Hunt in 1896 in Egypt.

The story is wonderful: Two young Oxford men in the 1890s excavated the garbage dump of an ancient city called Oxyrhynchus ("City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish). By 1907 they had 700 boxes of papyri -- gospels and philosophy and legal papers and letters. (Grocery lists, too?)

Oxford is crowdsourcing the transcription.

Take a look at this link and see if you think it's right for you (you may have to reload to get a fragment with writing on it):
Ancient Lives | Transcribe

I've been up all night coding, so I'm going to give you the Metafilter item verbatim:

Ancient Lives is a project by the University of Oxford which asks your help in transcribing fragments from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Collection using the Zooniverse model. Leader of the project, Chris Lintott, explains the project here in a short interview. Can you help him find his one-eyed astrologer? [Oxyrhynchus previously]

Wikipedia on Oxyrhynchus