A few weeks ago I wrote about the ancient, scorched papyri buried at Herculaneum by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D., that, although rediscovered in 1752, have just now become legible thanks to new technology.
That same technology is now uncovering astonishing treasures in another collection of papyri–not, this time, from a great Roman villa but from a far more prosaic source: the rubbish heaps of an ancient Egyptian town.
In 1896 young English excavators Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt set off from Oxford to Egypt to look for papyri containing lost works of classical literature. They chose a site where tantalizing fragments had already turned up: the remnants of a city the Greeks had named Oxyrhynchos (and the Romans Oxyrhynchus), literally The City of the Sharp Nosed Fish (because its sacred fish was the sharp-nosed pike).
Oxyrhynchus had walls 4.8 kilometres around, five or more gates, streets that stretched more than 1 1/2 kilometres, a theatre with seating for 11,000, and a natural canal that connected to the Nile. Like any town that size, it generated a lot of rubbish, which was dumped outside the walls, between the city and the surrounding farms and orchards.
Oxyrhynchus throve for 750 years, from 400 B.C. to 350 A.D., but has left no ruins for archeologists to explore. Over the centuries, its stones were all hauled away to be used elsewhere–but nobody bothered to haul away the rubbish until Grenfell and Hunt got there.
They worked on the site for many years with a large workforce of 30 foremen and 100 workmen. Interesting bits of papyrus were shipped back to Oxford, where the two men spent their summers cataloguing and trying to decipher them. They published 16 volumes of translated papyri fragments, and captured the imagination of both the public and the scientific world.
During their first year alone they found lost plays of Sophocles and many other books and fragments, including parts of an unknown gospel. Grenfell died in 1920, but Hunt carried on until 1934, by which time the collection in Oxford consisted of perhaps 400,000 fragments, stored in 800 boxes in the Sackler Library.
Perhaps just as interesting as the bits of literary classics discovered were the ordinary papers, which recorded everyday life: the price of a donkey, what schoolchildren were studying, how Theon, a university student, found his professors useless but was grateful to his father for sending him a food hamper (some things never change), how eight-year-old slave Epaphroditus leaned out of a bedroom window to watch castanet-players in the street below, slipped and fell to his death; how Apollonius and Sarapias sent a thousand roses and four thousand narcissuses for the wedding of a friend’s son.
Frustratingly, many of the fragments simply couldn’t be read, due to decay, the ravages of worms, and the blackening effect of time. But that, thanks to the same Multi-Spectral Imaging (MSI) technology used on the scrolls from Herculaneum, has changed.
Developed by NASA to study planets, and adapted by researchers from Brigham Young University to the study of ancient documents, MSI examines objects with sensors that can see in wavelengths outside the visible spectrum–particularly infrared, certain wavelengths of which ancient ink reflects in a way papyrus, no matter how black to the naked eye, does not. The results from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri have been spectacular.
Over just a few days last week, Oxford University scientists found new scraps of work by several ancient literary giants, including parts of a long-lost tragedy by Sophocles, part of a lost novel by the second-century Greek writer Lucian, previously unknown material by Euripides, poetry by the 1st-century BC Greek poet Parthenios, work by the 7th-century B.C. poet Hesiod, and more. One major discovery was a 30-line passage from the poet Archilocos–only 500 lines of his poetry were previously known to have survived.
These are fragments, but with enough fragments of the same book, quite large sections of text may be reassembled. Remaining holes (figurative or, in the case of worm-tracks, literal) can sometimes be filled in from quotations by later authors or by grammatical analysis.
In all, it’s thought that the new material, once deciphered, will total around five million words, and increase the number of great Greek and Roman works in existence by 20 percent.
Classicists are, as you might imagine, excited, with some talking in terms of a “second Renaissance.”
One thing’s for sure: the saying about one man’s trash being another man’s treasure holds true for other things than garage sales.
