OXYRHYNCHUS UPDATE: David Meadows collects all the latest news over at Rogue Classicism. Curiouser and curiouser ...

UPDATE: Important news on the Textual Criticism list. Wieland Willker forwards a message by Oxford papyrologist Dr. Dirk Obbink on the PAPY list regarding the Independent. Follow the link to read the whole thing.

Like other collections we do not normally announce our findings in advance of publication. In this case a team from ISPART (formerly CPART) at Brigham Young University in Utah spent last week creating MSI images (that is, at all ranges of the light band) of papyri in Oxford as part of a project begun in 2002. We scanned portions of the unrolled Herculaneum papyrus in the Bodleian Library and experimented on problematic carbonised and non-carbonised samples in the Oxyrhynchus collection in the Sackler Library ...

Details of the results follow.

The London press got wind of this (the unrolled Herculaneum papyrus of Epicurus' Peri physeos in the British Library is being done this week) and reported enthusiastically, if selectively. No mention, for example, was made of the success on the Bodleian Herculaneum papyrus (P.Herc. 118), now thereby revealed to be a Peri Epikourou or at any rate a pre-Philodemean history of the school. The article certainly should not have said (if it did) that all the papyri had been discovered yesterday, only that we made significant (and sufficiently exciting) advances in reading and confirmation of identifications with some, the same with some other pieces, while still others were identified for the first time, some standard classical authors, as usual, while others remain complete mysteries. ...

This does seem to confirm that the project has made "significant advances" recently, including identifying new fragments of classical authors. It clarifies that both the Oxyrhynchus and the Herculaneum texts were involved. We are not told how "the London press got wind of this" and it seems that Dr. Obbink himself has not seen the Independent article, which seems odd. He will be presenting the results in Berkeley this month and Oxford next month. I hope that means that something will go up on the Oxford Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project website soon as well.