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"With the help of enhanced imagery and an expert in Elizabethan script, archaeologists are beginning to unravel the meaning of mysterious text and images etched into a rare 400-year-old slate tablet discovered this past summer at Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in America. Digitally enhanced images of the slate are helping to isolate inscriptions and illuminate fine details on the slate-the first with extensive inscriptions discovered at any early American colonial site, said William Kelso, director of research and interpretation at the 17th-century Historic Jamestowne site (Jamestown map). (Explore an interactive guide to colonial Jamestown.) The enhancements have helped researchers identify a 16th-century writing style used on the slate and discern new symbols, researchers announced last week. The characters may be from an obscure Algonquian Indian alphabet created by an English scientist to help explorers pronounce the language spoken by the Virginia Indians. "Just like finding the Rosetta Stone led to a better understanding of the Egyptians, this tablet is beginning to add significantly to our understanding of the earliest years at Jamestown," Kelso said. It conveys messages about literacy, art, symbols and signs personally communicated by the colonists who used it, he explained. "What other single artifact has been found that has so much to tell?" Both sides of the scratched and worn 5-by-8 inch (13-by-20 centimeter) tablet are covered with words, symbols, numbers, and drawings of people, plants, and birds that its owner or other users likely encountered in the New World. There are differences in the style of handwriting, which may mean that more than one person used the tablet as a sketch pad and possibly for writing rough drafts of documents, Kelso noted. Enhanced Images To help researchers decipher the inscriptions, curators at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum Conservation Institute recently produced enhanced images

"Wordsworth changed forever the way we view the natural world and the inner world of feeling. He also connected the two indivisibly. We are his heirs, and we see and feel through him. His vision illumined our landscape. His name is inextricably connected with the Lake District, where he was born in Cockermouth in 1770. His mother died when he was only eight, his father five years later. These early losses gave him an acute apprehension of mortality, but did not impair the flow of his affections. His mother had loved him enough, and her love lasted beyond the grave. He had a free and happy country childhood, and joy is one of his themes: through his vocation as a poet he transformed fear of mortality to intimations of immortality. The story of his early life - his schooldays, his education at Cambridge, his wanderings in France, his response to the French revolution, his love of his sister Dorothy and his passionate friendship with Coleridge - are told in his great autobiographical work in blank verse, The Prelude, most of which written when he was in his 30s (only sections of it were published in his lifetime.) It is a work of astonishing originality, both in its subject matter (childhood and the growth of the mind, described with a pre-Freudian insight unprecedented in literature) and in its form. The verse is powerful, supple, subtle, freely flowing. Wordsworth revered both Shakespeare and Milton. His is the third great iambic voice in the English language. His first volume of poems, Lyrical Ballads, written in collaboration with Coleridge and published in 1798, stakes his territory: the plain, the rustic, the thoughtful, the everyday, the organic: a poetry in which "the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature". It includes The Idiot Boy, a moving ballad treating its challenging subject (a mother's love for her "idiot" son sent out into the night to fetch the doctor for a sick neighbour) with the deepest respect and

"Lost" Language Found on Back of 400-Year-Old Letter

Welcome to European History Primary Sources (EHPS), an index of scholarly websites that offer online access to digitised primary sources on the history of Europe. The websites listed on EHPS are not only meta-sources but also include invented archives and born digital sources. Each website that is listed in EHPS has a short description and is categorised according to country, language, period, subject and type of source. The portal can be searched in a variety of ways. The listed websites can be accessed for free, though sometimes a registration is required. EHPS is a work in progress and new content is regularly added. In order to stay updated on new entries or specific categories in which you are interested it is possible to subscribe to RSS feeds or to follow EHPS on Twitter.

"Most books are intended to be easily read and understood, and the oldest ones can often serve as windows into long-extinct cultures and ways of life. But others, either because of intentional obfuscation by the author or by virtue of being written in dead languages, remain mysterious to the scholars that study them. From obscure religious texts and books about magic to unbreakable codes and ciphers, the following are the ten artifacts of literature that have most confounded researchers and translators."