An Italian computer engineer has solved the mystery of the long-intriguing copy of Homer's 'The Odyssey'.
According to NBC News, the donor who had given the book dating back to 1504 to the University of Chicago Library had put up a 1,000 dollar reward for anyone who managed to translate the handwritten lines and the script in French on the some of the book's pages, Fox News reported.
Daniele Metilli, a student of digital humanities, along with Giula Accetta, his colleague who knew both the French language and contemporary Italian stenography, managed to unmask the script correctly as a system of shorthand invented by Jean Coulon de Thevenot in the late 1700's.
But the translated copy ended up being mostly French translations of portions of the Greek text, and Metilli mentioned on his website that they still don't know much about the annotator as there are no personal references in the notes.
The two are now trying to figure out the author's identity and why the writing appears only in one portion of the text.
