"It's being called a second Renaissance," says Todd Hickey, a curator of papyri at the University of California, Berkeley, which has some 26,000 pieces of papyrus, many still unread. "It's revealing things that we didn't have a hope of reading in the past."
High technology used to recover ancient literature that would otherwise be lost. Rarely is science of such direct benefit to the humanities.
imho the significance of this stuff is on the scale of rediscovery of greek texts in Moslem libraries on Cordova and Cadiz in the 15th century after Ferdinand and Isabella kicked out the moors.