New Technology Enables Reading of Ancient Text -- Huge increase in knowledge of Greece and Rome expected

The Independent News story

Some 400,000 papyrus fragments were discovered in ancient dumps outside the Graeco-Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus ("city of the sharp-nosed fish") in central Egypt at the end of the 19th century. The original papyrus documents are decayed, worm-eaten and blackened by the passage of time, and have in the past been unintelligible. "But scientists using the new photographic technique, developed from satellite imaging, are bringing the original writing back into view."

"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." Academics have hailed it as a development which could lead to a 20 per cent increase in the number of great Greek and Roman works in existence. It could easily double the surviving body of lesser work.

In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used the new techniques on the papyrus to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia.