Here you go, Nelson…
I was listening to NPR on Sunday & heard a story about Oxyrhynchos & the artifacts that were unearthed there. Apparently a process was recently developed that allows the writing on the papyri to be read, when the writing is faded or the papyrus is blackened (I can’t remember which). So now 104 trunks full of papyrus from Oxyrhynchos that have been sitting around Oxford since 1897 can be read. And what do you suppose these papyri contain? Nothing less than 7 previously undiscovered plays by Sophocles, works by other classical authors previously unknown, plus letters & other detritus of everyday life in Oxyrhynchos over a thousand years. How unbelievably cool is that? And what I want to know is, why haven’t I heard about this before? This is probably only the biggest thing in classics in a century, not to mention a major upcoming task for libraries… why isn’t everyone talking about this?
Anyway, these materials were recovered from the town’s trash pile, which, Oxyrhynchos being in Egypt, basically just got covered in sand, so nothing ever decayed. I had a history teacher in high school who used to say that all archaeology was digging through other people’s trash; how right you were, Mrs. Fisher! Because it was a trash pile, most documents are incomplete – that half a scroll someone threw away, or whatever. And the most entertaining part: the archaeologists who dug at Oxyrhynchos? Undergraduates in the Archaeology program at Oxford. How about that for undergraduate research?
Strangely, I can’t find the program that I heard anywhere online; not on WUNC‘s site, NPR‘s site, not on BBC Radio‘s site. All my info above (such as it is) comes from 2 sources:
POxy: Oxyrhynchus Online, from Oxford
Oxyrhynchus – City of the Sharp Nosed Fish, which appears to be a companion site to a piece that aired on BBC Radio in 2002. I feel like I’m in that Twilight Zone episode where the radio only tunes in programming from the past. Oooooo…