The E-Sylum:  Volume 8, Number 16, April 17, 2005, Article 12

UNREADABLE ANCIENT MANUSCRIPTS YIELDING SECRETS

Asylum Editor E. Tomlinson Fort forwarded this article about
how 9,000 year-old manuscripts are yielding new information.

"A vast array of previously unintelligible manuscripts from
ancient Greece and Rome are being read for the first time
thanks to infra-red light, in a breakthrough hailed as the
classical equivalent of finding the holy grail."

Oxyrhynchus, situated on a tributary of the Nile 100 miles
south of Cairo, was a prosperous regional capital and the
third city of Egypt, with 35,000 people. It was populated
mainly by Greek immigrants, who left behind tonnes of papyri
upon which slaves trained in Greek had documented the
community#39;s arts and goings-on.

Oxford#39;s researchers started salvaging 100,000 fragments
of papyri from the town#39;s rubbish dump in 1897 and shipped
some 800 containers back to Britain. About 2,000 pieces of
the papyri have been published and mounted in glass, but the
rest has remained in boxes. According to the current research
team, "the mass of unedited material represents the random
waste-paper of seven centuries of Greco-Egyptian life".

Some 10 per cent of it is literary, the fragmentary remains of
ancient books, with the rest documents of public and private
life, such as census returns, tax assessments, court records,
wills, horoscopes and private letters."

"Material ranges from the 3rd to the 7th centuries BC and
includes work by classical writers such as Sophocles,
Euripides and Hesiod. But many of the manuscripts have
decayed and blackened over time.

Those uncovered so far include parts of the Epigonoi,
(Progeny), a long-lost tragedy by Sophocles, the 5th century
BC Greek playwright, and part of a lost novel by Lucian, a
2nd century Greek writer. There is also an epic poem by
Archilochos, a 7th century successor of Homer, which
describes events leading up to the Trojan war. "

To read the full article, see: Full Story

  Wayne Homren, Editor

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