Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

sharp-nosed fish city

Oxyrhynchus is in the news again. [Last mentioned by UJG here.]

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 prose is a tad bit sensationalistic, but it is an important development in paleography and classical philology. Some of the newly deciphered texts will be published next month by the owners of the papyri, the Egypt Exploration Society, which financed the collection’s discovery. Some of the academics involved, professors Obbink, Pelling, and Janko, are mentioned by name in the article.

It’s even been slashdotted already.