Can You Guess the Origins of Papyrus Fragments or Painted Ceramics? A College Student Turned the Met’s Open-Access Database Into an Online Game

If you consider yourself an art history buff, test your smarts with Anthropeum. The game pulls ten images from the Met’s open-access archive and challenges players to identify each artifact’s time and place of origin

Michele Debczak | Correspondent

July 7, 2026 1:09 p.m.

Share

Copy linkEmailSMSFacebookXRedditLinkedInBlueskyPrint

Add as preferred source

Sifting through the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s digital collection of data and images for more than 492,000 artworks can be a daunting task. A new online game created by University of Washington undergrad Matthew Chu might help. Each day, Anthropeum serves players ten artifacts from the institution’s archives while testing their knowledge of art history.

The object of the game is simple: identify an item’s place and time of origin by dropping a pin on a map and dragging a marker across a timeline. The goal is to guess correctly based on an image of the item and a few facts about it. If players are stumped, they also have access to a few hints they can choose to use at any point during the ten rounds. If a bronze statue originated in Rome, for example, a geography hint may share that it comes from somewhere in the Mediterranean.

Once the guess is submitted, Anthropeum reveals the correct answers along with a more detailed description of the artifact. Points are awarded based on how close the guesses came to being correct, and at the end of the game players can see how well they performed compared with everyone else who played. As is the case with other popular online puzzles like Wordle, the game refreshes with a new set of challenges every day.

The Met itself is not affiliated with the new game. According to the creator, Anthropeum isn’t just a chance for art history buffs to flex their knowledge. It can also be used as an educational tool for players of all levels. “It’s meant to challenge us,” Chu tells Scientific American’s Emma Gometz. “I want people to see stuff that they don’t know, so they can learn about it.”

The 21-year-old accounting and data science major felt inspired after spending time with collectors and watching them identify coins and other artifacts, per Scientific American. He saw the potential to turn the process into a game, and, thanks to the Met’s open-access initiative, he didn’t have to look hard for high-quality materials to use.

Images of the museum’s public-domain works have been free to use under the Creative Commons Zero license since 2017. By making hundreds of thousands of pictures freely available to anyone with an internet connection, Met officials hoped to extend the institution’s reach beyond its physical location in New York City.

“Since our audience is really the three billion internet-connected individuals around the world, we need to think big about how to reach these viewers and increase our focus on those digital tactics that have the greatest impact. Open Access is one of those tactics,” Loic Tallon, the museum’s chief digital officer at the time, wrote in a blog post announcing the initiative.

The digital archive was an immediate hit. Within six months, the Met’s website saw a 64 percent uptick in image downloads. It remains an invaluable resource to everyone from scholars to casual enthusiasts.

“It’s inspiring to see how creative people are when you make a collection like the Met’s accessible for them to use, share and remix without restriction,” Tallon told Artnet’s Sarah Cascone in 2017.

Chu’s latest project is one example of how open-access images can be used to build something entirely new.

“A lot of my projects have been built around [open-source databases],” Chu tells Scientific American. “Making your project open source, someone else can build off of that and make life better for the people around you.”

Anthropeum also pulls mapping information from the open-source databases historical-basemaps and OpenHistoricalMap. Chu hopes to add artifacts from other collections in the future, but for now he’s limited to free-to-use resources. Even just pulling from the Met’s portal, he was able to program his algorithm to serve players ten new images to analyze every day for a decade. For his next phase of the project, Chu plans to make the game’s archives accessible, so players will be able to continue the fun even after completing that day’s challenge.

Michele Debczak | Read More

Michele Debczak is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New York. She appears in seasons four through six of History Channel’s “The Food That Built America,” and her work has been featured in Mental Floss, IndieWire, Eater and Vice.