TECHNOLOGY WATCH: According to the Independent, new imagining techniques are allowing the recovery of a vast amount of new information from the Oxyrhynchus papyri.

Decoded at last: the 'classical holy grail' that may rewrite the history of the world

Scientists begin to unlock the secrets of papyrus scraps bearing long-lost words by the literary giants of Greece and Rome

By David Keys and Nicholas Pyke

17 April 2005

For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.

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 web page of the Oxford Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project is here (and note this page especially), but there's nothing about the breakthrough there yet.

The Independent article describes the techniques as follows:

Since it was unearthed more than a century ago, the hoard of documents known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri has fascinated classical scholars. There are 400,000 fragments, many containing text from the great writers of antiquity. But only a small proportion have been read so far. Many were illegible.

Now scientists are using multi-spectral imaging techniques developed from satellite technology to read the papyri at Oxford University's Sackler Library. The fragments, preserved between sheets of glass, respond to the infra-red spectrum - ink invisible to the naked eye can be seen and photographed.

The fragments form part of a giant "jigsaw puzzle" to be reassembled. Missing "pieces" can be supplied from quotations by later authors, and grammatical analysis.

Much like the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And this passage really caught my eye:

When it has all been read - mainly in Greek, but sometimes in Latin, Hebrew, Coptic, Syriac, Aramaic, Arabic, Nubian and early Persian - the new material will probably add up to around five million words. Texts deciphered over the past few days will be published next month by the London-based Egypt Exploration Society, which financed the discovery and owns the collection.

We are already aware that the Oxyrhynchus papyri contain some of our earliest fragments of important Old Testament pseudepigrapha (2 Baruch is an example), and it's on our agenda to go through the published material to look for hitherto unidentified pseudepigrapha fragments for the More Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Project. With luck, perhaps these new developments will add to our corpus.

UPDATE: David Meadows, over at Rogue Classicism says that most of the information in this article is a couple of years old and he speculates that this is opening hype for an as yet unannounced documentary. Maybe so, but some of the most interesting information about the new texts is presented as less than a week old. Is this poor editing of an older article or is the information actually new? Anyhow, it's new to me and has never been noted on PaleoJudaica before, so I'm glad they ran the piece.

UPDATE (18 April): Wieland Willker is skeptical.

UPDATE: More from David Meadows. BBC Radio 4 had a documentary on Oxyrhynchus.

UPDATE (20 April): More here.

UPDATE (1 May): More here, here, and here.