Lost Classical Manuscripts Revealed

[qos]

Shamelessly stolen from thomryng

My head is spinning. . .


For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament. . . .

Read the rest here: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=630165

Comments

[athenian-abroad.livejournal.com]

Very exciting indeed! A couple of questions leap to mind:

• What is the estimated date range represented by the already-known Oxyrhynchus material? Can material of this nature be dated physically, or do fragments have to be dated based on internal textual properties?


• How well prepared is the scholarly community to process and evaluate material of this volume and nature? Reconstructing literary texts -- Hesiod and the like -- is one thing, but turning five thousand fragmentary shopping lists into meaningful social and economic history is another. Are there armies of eager grad students standing by to work on a trove like this?

[qos.livejournal.com]

Good questions (of course). And I'm sure that there *are* armies of grad students willing to work on this. I'm sure there will be junk mixed up in it, but evidently there is already some new stuff among the finds. Time will tell.