Big news in the world of classical literature. A collection of 400,000 document fragments from the trash-heaps of an ancient town in central Egypt can finally be translated. All of the source languages are known (Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Coptic, Syriac, Aramaic, Arabic, Nubian, and early Persian), but the papyri were unreadable from decay. Oxford University scientists have now used infra-red imaging to successfully reveal the text. Expect new material from Sophocles, Lucian, Euripides, Parthenios, Hesiod, and Archilochos. Holy crap.
Check out more info in Wikipedia's entry for the city of Oxyrhynchus (and marvel that it's already been updated with the news article).
And definitely spend a few hours or months combing through the wonderful resource of classical texts over at The Perseus Project. It was an invaluable complement to the Pharr book [Amazon] when I was learning (yet have now forgotten) Homeric Greek.
I second your Holy Crap!
Posted by: Mason at April 19, 2005 07:57 PMThere is some concern from a commenter at language hat (http://www.languagehat.com/archives/001849.php) that the fragments are too fragmentary. Language hat also points to the online source (http://www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk/).
The /. discussion (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/17/0845214&from=rss) appeared on Sunday, but it devolved quickly into peripheral arguments about religion (a /. thread w/ a low attention span? No!).