Fwd: Wow!

[Bruce Kirkley]

Some of you may have already heard this exciting news, but thought I'd post it for those who may not have. Thanks to Vancouver director, Richard Wolfe, who passed it along to me.

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>From THE INDEPENDENT (UK)

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.




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