Classical holy grail

A good friend forwarded me this news story:

The Independent reports 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.

Will Baude blogged Apparently we are on the verge of uncovering loads of classical works previously thought lost

Alex Tabarrok called his reader's attention to this item.

The Light of Reason blogged How incredibly, spectacularly wonderful. I’ve been very personally discouraged of late—but this is the kind of event that gives me enormous hope, and the courage to go on, no matter what barriers may seem to be in front of us. You truly never know what tomorrow may bring. And on very rare occasions, it can bring a miracle—or as close to a miracle as we are likely to see. And this is certainly very close indeed to a miracle. I still have goosebumps. Wow.

blogged New and improved ancient texts.... There is more where the above came from here.

Kiko Matsing blogged Classical Writings That May Change Human History Discovered in Ancient Garbage Dump.

Jim Davila blogged 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. 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.

Winston Smith blogged Ancient Greece maybe have just become less tragic

See also this article, and check out a number of the links highlighted above