150-year-old writing in copy of Homer's 'Odyssey' identified

Italian researchers have solved a 150-year-old literary mystery found in a rare 16th-century edition of Homer's Odyssey.
The 1504 Venetian edition of the Odyssey at the University of Chicago Library contains handwritten annotations in a previously unknown script.
The annotations were thought to date back to the mid-19th century, but nothing else was known about them.
The rare edition was part of Homer's works donated to the University by collector M C Lang in 2007.
The Library's Special Collections Research Center called on linguists, classicists and amateur sleuths, publicising a USD 1,000 prize offered by Lang to the first person to identify the script, provide evidence to support the conclusion and execute a translation of selected portions of the marginalia.

The contest generated an enormous online response and submissions from around the world.

The winner of the contest, Daniele Metilli, worked with Giula Accetta, a colleague who is proficient in contemporary Italian stenography and fluent in French.
Metilli identified the mystery script correctly as a system of shorthand invented by Jean Coulon de Thevenot in the late 18th century.
The annotations themselves are mostly French translations of words and phrases from the Greek text of the Odyssey.
Based on the mix of French words with the script and a legible date of April 25, 1854, Metilli and Accetta began with the assumption that it was a system of French stenography in use in the mid-19th century.

After rejecting several 19th-century French stenographic systems, they found a chart comparing one of them to the "tachygraphie" (shorthand) system invented by Thevenot.
They found an 1819 edition revised by a professor of stenography, N Patey, online. Armed with two contemporary French translations of the Odyssey, one published in 1842, the other in 1854-66, they began the work of translating the annotations.
In Thevenot's system, "every consonant and vowel has a starting shape, and they combine together to form new shapes representing syllables," Metilli said.
"The vertical alignment is especially important, as the position of a letter above or below the line, or even the length of a letter segment can change the value of the grapheme.

"This explains why most notes in the Odyssey shorthand are underlined - the line being key to the transcription," Metilli added.
Metilli and Accetta are continuing to work on the annotations, and hope to discover the identity of their author and an explanation for why they only exist in one section of the text.