Ancient papyri revealing ancient texts

[Madame Butterfly 0]

Decoded at last: the 'classical holy grail' that may rewrite the history of the world

Scientists begin to unlock the secrets of papyrus scraps bearing long-lost words by the literary giants of Greece and Rome

By David Keys and Nicholas Pyke

17 April 2005

 

 

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.

 

The original papyrus documents, discovered in an ancient rubbish dump in central Egypt, are often meaningless to the naked eye - decayed, worm-eaten and blackened by the passage of time. But scientists using the new photographic technique, developed from satellite imaging, are bringing the original writing back into view. 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".

 

Christopher Pelling, Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford, described the new works as "central texts which scholars have been speculating about for centuries".

 

Professor Richard Janko, a leading British scholar, formerly of University College London, now head of classics at the University of Michigan, said: "Normally we are lucky to get one such find per decade." One discovery in particular, a 30-line passage from the poet Archilocos, of whom only 500 lines survive in total, is described as "invaluable" by Dr Peter Jones, author and co-founder of the Friends of Classics campaign.

 

The papyrus fragments were discovered in historic dumps outside the Graeco-Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus ("city of the sharp-nosed fish") in central Egypt at the end of the 19th century. Running to 400,000 fragments, stored in 800 boxes at Oxford's Sackler Library, it is the biggest hoard of classical manuscripts in the world.

 

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.

 

Oxford academics have been working alongside infra-red specialists from Brigham Young University, Utah. Their operation is likely to increase the number of great literary works fully or partially surviving from the ancient Greek world by up to a fifth. It could easily double the surviving body of lesser work - the pulp fiction and sitcoms of the day.

 

"The Oxyrhynchus collection is of unparalleled importance - especially now that it can be read fully and relatively quickly," said the Oxford academic directing the research, Dr Dirk Obbink. "The material will shed light on virtually every aspect of life in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, and, by extension, in the classical world as a whole."

 

The breakthrough has also caught the imagination of cultural commentators. Melvyn Bragg, author and presenter, said: "It's the most fantastic news. There are two things here. The first is how enormously influential the Greeks were in science and the arts. The second is how little of their writing we have. The prospect of having more to look at is wonderful."

 

Bettany Hughes, historian and broadcaster, who has presented TV series including Mysteries of the Ancients and The Spartans, said: "Egyptian rubbish dumps were gold mines. The classical corpus is like a jigsaw puzzle picked up at a jumble sale - many more pieces missing than are there. Scholars have always mourned the loss of works of genius - plays by Sophocles, Sappho's other poems, epics. These discoveries promise to change the textual map of the golden ages of Greece and Rome."

 

When it has all been read - mainly in Greek, but sometimes in Latin, Hebrew, Coptic, Syriac, Aramaic, Arabic, Nubian and early Persian - the new material will probably add up to around five million words. Texts deciphered over the past few days will be published next month by the London-based Egypt Exploration Society, which financed the discovery and owns the collection.

 

A 21st-century technique reveals antiquity's secrets

 

Since it was unearthed more than a century ago, the hoard of documents known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri has fascinated classical scholars. There are 400,000 fragments, many containing text from the great writers of antiquity. But only a small proportion have been read so far. Many were illegible.

 

Now scientists are using multi-spectral imaging techniques developed from satellite technology to read the papyri at Oxford University's Sackler Library. The fragments, preserved between sheets of glass, respond to the infra-red spectrum - ink invisible to the naked eye can be seen and photographed.

 

The fragments form part of a giant "jigsaw puzzle" to be reassembled. Missing "pieces" can be supplied from quotations by later authors, and grammatical analysis.

 

Key words from the master of Greek tragedy

 

Speaker A: . . . gobbling the whole, sharpening the flashing iron.

 

Speaker B: And the helmets are shaking their purple-dyed crests, and for the wearers of breast-plates the weavers are striking up the wise shuttle's songs, that wakes up those who are asleep.

 

Speaker A: And he is gluing together the chariot's rail.

 

These words were written by the Greek dramatist Sophocles, and are the only known fragment we have of his lost play Epigonoi (literally "The Progeny"), the story of the siege of Thebes. Until last week's hi-tech analysis of ancient scripts at Oxford University, no one knew of their existence, and this is the first time they have been published.

 

Sophocles (495-405 BC), was a giant of the golden age of Greek civilisation, a dramatist who work alongside and competed with Aeschylus, Euripides and Aristophanes.

 

His best-known work is Oedipus Rex, the play that later gave its name to the Freudian theory, in which the hero kills his father and marries his mother - in a doomed attempt to escape the curse he brings upon himself. His other masterpieces include Antigone and Electra.

 

Sophocles was the cultured son of a wealthy Greek merchant, living at the height of the Greek empire. An accomplished actor, he performed in many of his own plays. He also served as a priest and sat on the committee that administered Athens. A great dramatic innovator, he wrote more than 120 plays, but only seven survive in full.

 

Last week's remarkable finds also include work by Euripides, Hesiod and Lucian, plus a large and particularly significant paragraph of text from the Elegies, by Archilochos, a Greek poet of the 7th century BC.

19 April 2005 21:50

[Madame Butterfly 0]

Additional news on this.

 

NASA science uncovers texts of Trojan Wars, early gospel

 

 

 

By Tom Hundley

Tribune foreign correspondent

 

May 19, 2005

 

 

OXFORD, England -- The scholars at Oxford University are not sure how it works or why; all they know is that it does.

 

A relatively new technology called multispectral imaging is turning a pile of ancient garbage into a gold mine of classical knowledge, bringing to light the lost texts of Sophocles and Euripides as well as some early Christian gospels that do not appear in the New Testament.

 

 

 

Originally developed by NASA scientists and used to map the surface of Mars, multispectral imaging was successfully applied to some badly charred Roman manuscripts that were buried during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Examining those carbonized manuscripts under different wavelengths of light suddenly revealed writing that had been invisible to scholars for two centuries.

 

Now scientists are shining the multispectral light on the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, an enormous collection of texts unearthed from the rubbish heaps of the vanished city of Oxyrhynchus, about 100 miles south of Cairo.

 

First excavated by two Oxford archeologists in the late 19th Century, the hoard of papyrus from Oxyrhynchus has long been a source of fascination and frustration for scholars: Fascination because it holds some of the lost masterpieces of classical literature, frustration because much of it is in such poor condition it's impossible to read.

 

But the multispectral imaging has "produced miraculous results," according to Dirk Obbink, a lecturer in papyrology and Greek literature at Oxford who is directing the project.

 

"No one knows exactly why it produces the results it does," Obbink said of the technology. "But with texts that are difficult to read, it's a night-and-day difference."

 

In the past few weeks alone, researchers have succeeded in deciphering a 70-line fragment from a lost tragedy by Sophocles and a 30-line fragment from Archilochos, a Greek soldier-poet who chronicled the Trojan Wars.

 

The Archilochos fragment confirms what scholars have long suspected: that the Greeks got lost on their way to invade Troy and mistakenly landed at place called Mysia. There they fought a battle, lost and had to regroup before heading off again for Troy.

 

The Archilochos fragment will be published later this month. The newly discovered lines from Sophocles are scheduled for publication in August.

 

High-tech Lazy Susan

 

"To get a piece like that every 10 years, we think ourselves lucky, so I'd have to say that this is a very exciting development," said professor Richard Janko, head of the classics department at the University of Michigan.

 

Multispectral imaging uses digital cameras equipped with a kind of revolving Lazy Susan of light filters that isolate the waveband at which the obscured ink contrasts most vividly with the dark background of the papyrus, the paper of the ancient Egyptians.

 

"Some parts [of the writing] respond well to infrared; other parts respond to something further along the spectrum," Obbink said.

 

A sequence of images taken at all ranges of the light spectrum are then put together, and the result often is a document of startling clarity. The technique for adapting NASA's technology to the reading of ancient manuscripts was developed at Brigham Young University in Utah, which is assisting Oxford with the Oxyrhynchus project.

 

The Oxyrhynchus collection, housed at Oxford University's Sackler Library, consists of more than half a million scraps of papyrus. Some of it is in excellent condition, but much of it is worm-eaten and darkened by time.

 

All of it was collected from the rubbish dumps of Oxyrhynchus, a city that flourished after the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C. The city remained prominent in the Roman and Byzantine periods but declined after the Arab conquest in A.D. 641.

 

For a thousand years, the inhabitants dumped their trash in the desert. Over time the dumpsites were covered by sand, and they remained covered until 1896 when Oxford archeologists Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt began excavating the area.

 

At first, Grenfell thought that what he and Hunt had found was "nothing but rubbish mounds," but they quickly came to appreciate that they had found a remarkable window into the literary and ordinary lives of the ancients.

 

There were plays by Sophocles and Euripides, poems of Pindar and Sappho, and some of the earliest documents recording Christianity's spread to Egypt. The gospel of Thomas, for example, records the "Sayings of Jesus" in a manner that some scholars of early Christianity believe is more authentic than the Gospels in the New Testament.

 

There also is an abundance of life's everyday stuff and miscellanea--tax records, marriage contracts, horoscopes, erotic musings, advice on how to buy a donkey and advice on how to cast a decent magic spell.

 

"It's as if you took a slice out of everybody's hard drive, or every 10th page out of every 10th book in the library--what you have is a complete slice of life," said Obbink, the project director.

 

The problem was sorting the wheat from the chaff and deciphering scripts that had been damaged or obscured.

 

1 percent in a century

 

Working steadily for more than a century, scholars at Oxford managed to decipher, interpret and publish about 5,000 text fragments, about 1 percent of the total collection, according to Nick Gonis, the collection's curator. Multispectral imaging could help speed the process.

 

Meanwhile, the Oxford team is looking at another promising application of the technology. Scholars have long known that the elaborately painted cartonnage used to encase mummies was a kind of papier-mache made from papyrus. A lot of the papyrus has writing on it, but there didn't seem to be a way of reading it without destroying the decorative cartonnage.

 

In one recent trial, the imaging process was able to read writing beneath the painted surface of a cartonnage fragment. Scholars were thrilled, even though it turned out to be just another government report.

 

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[Wishfire 2]

Fascinating. I'd like to read the Archilochos fragment.

[Kor37 9]

This is facinating stuff.

But I have to wonder if the Church will suppress any of it if it disagrees with their teachings?

[Theunicornhunter 2]

This is facinating stuff.

But I have to wonder if the Church will suppress any of it if it disagrees with their teachings?

326122[/snapback]

 

which church? Maybe I read wrong but is it a church or Oxford that owns the material?