by Ken Bell

One of the great crimes of humanity, it seems to me, was the wholesale burning and destruction of almost the entirety of what was once a treasure trove of literature, that of the Mayas, by Spanish priests.

But the obliteration of the past need not be an intentionally malevolent act. Time and events alone efface us, and destroy our memories.

Of course, this is also wherein lies the wonder of the art and science of archaeology. It is, in essence, a rediscovery of what we once knew. One beautiful such instance, regarding a century-old discovery of ancient Greek and Roman writings discovered in a buried trash dump, is related in Saturday’s edition of the UK’s Independent.

As they report “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.”

The original papyrus documents were discovered more than a century ago in an ancient rubbish dump in central Egypt. Oxyrhynchus, site of the discovery, lies a little over 100 miles southwest of modern-day Cairo on a Nile tributary. It rose to prominence during the Hellenistic period, and in the Roman Empire. As a regional capital, it was onsidered to be the third city of Egypt.

Most of the papyri are decayed, worm-eaten, black and unreadable – until now. Using new photographic techniques developed from satellite imaging, scientists are restoring the original writing to view. As David Keys and Nicholas Pyke write “Academics have hailed it as a development which could lead to a 20 per cent increase in the number of great Greek and Roman works in existence. Some are even predicting a ‘second Renaissance.’”

There is an online guide and database for the project, where you can find a very detailed description of their methodology for imaging. Or you can see a few photographs of the papyrus retained at Allentown Pennsylvania’s Muhlenberg College Trexler Library Rare Book Collection, here and especially here.

The potential for myriad discoveries is immense. With 400,000 fragments stored in 800 boxes at Oxford's Sackler Library, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri is the largest trove of classical manuscripts in the world.

As Keys and Pyke report, "The previously unknown texts, read for the first time last week, include parts of a long-lost tragedy - the Epigonoi ("Progeny") by the 5th-century BC Greek playwright Sophocles; part of a lost novel by the 2nd-century Greek writer Lucian; unknown material by Euripides; mythological poetry by the 1st-century BC Greek poet Parthenios; work by the 7th-century BC poet Hesiod; and an epic poem by Archilochos, a 7th-century successor of Homer, describing events leading up to the Trojan War. Additional material from Hesiod, Euripides and Sophocles almost certainly await discovery."

Eureka!

-From the April 2005 Austin Review