Posted on 04/20/2005 9:14:51 PM PDT by nickcarraway
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 tons of papyri upon which slaves trained in Greek had documented the community's arts and goings-on.
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. The technique could see the number of accounted-for ancient manuscripts increase by one fifth, and may even lead to the unveiling of some lost Christian gospels.
A team at Oxford University is using the technology to bring back into view faded ink on thousands of papyrus scrolls salvaged from an ancient rubbish dump in the 19th century.
The "multi-spectral imaging process," which is also used in producing images from satellites, uses infra-red light to reveal ink invisible to the eye.
The collection, taken from the now-disappeared town of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, has been stored in the Sackler library in Oxford, where it is the largest of its kind in the world.
Material ranges from the third to the seventh centuries B.C. 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 fifth century B.C. Greek playwright, and part of a lost novel by Lucian, a second century Greek writer. There is also an epic poem by Archilochos, a seventh century successor of Homer, which describes events leading up to the Trojan War.
Dr. Dirk Obbink, who is leading the imaging work, said it had far-reaching significance.
He said: "The Oxyrhynchus collection is of unparalleled importance -- especially now that it can be read fully and relatively quickly.
"The material will shed light on virtually every aspect of life in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, and, by extension, the classical world as a whole."
Christopher Pelling, regius professor of Greek at Oxford University, said the works were "central texts which scholars have been speculating about for centuries."
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 tons of papyri upon which slaves trained in Greek had documented the community's arts and goings-on.
Oxford's researchers started salvaging 100,000 fragments of papyri from the town'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 percent 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.
Melvyn Bragg, the peer, author and broadcaster, also hailed the breakthrough. He 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
Infrared and other such techniques have been used for 20 years.
I'm not sure what "new" discovery is being tested with this recent news.
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EXTRAORDINARY DISCOVERY UNLOCKS SECRETS OF THE ANCIENTS
The Sleeping Scotsman, Tall and Handsome Built
Sat 16 Apr 2005 | (Drudgereport.com) Scotsman.com
Posted on 04/16/2005 5:01:00 PM PDT by tricky_k_1972
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1385203/posts
WOW (Breakthrough in interpreting Oxyrhynchus Papyri)
the Light of Reason | 4/17/05 | Arthur Silber?
Posted on 04/17/2005 6:14:39 AM PDT by bitt
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1385405/posts
Decoded at last: the 'classical holy grail' that may rewrite the history of the world
RealOpinion.com
Posted on 04/17/2005 11:04:21 PM PDT by illbill
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1385767/posts
I was thinking that too about this technology is something they shoulda been using all along.
"court records, wills, horoscopes and private letters"
I bet one of those wills they find leaves me a big peace of pie (gold and stuff) that i should have inherited in the past life /sarc.
Why is it that articles are written that laboriously describe what something looks like when one picture would suffice?
I think they were just getting to the part about your piece of pie when the article abruptly ends.
Fester Chugabrew wrote:
I think they were just getting to the part about your piece of pie when the article abruptly ends.
--> I feel cheated! :)
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