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An interesting classical link
Apr. 17th, 2005 11:25 amReading lost classical texts
Very interesting -- apparently, one can use infra-red light or some such to read previously illegible fragments of papyri. At the moment the focus seems to be on the Oxyrhynchus Papyri collection at Oxford (you can read about the collection here) but presumably other universities will start doing the same.
At one point in my academic career, I was doing about as much work with papyri as someone who doesn't officially work with papyri and isn't a paleographer can. Now that I'm a Latinist, this won't impact me quite so directly, but like all the other classicists, I'm foaming at the mouth to see what they find next and digging up my old notes of "top ten works I wish we had." More Aeschylus, please! More lyric! Both of these are near-certainties, of course, so I will spare a thought for the prose works. The problem, of course, is one of length and genre -- 30 lines of Archilochus is quite a lot, but the same amount of Polybius or Xenophon isn't quite so useful, unless one is very lucky.
Very interesting -- apparently, one can use infra-red light or some such to read previously illegible fragments of papyri. At the moment the focus seems to be on the Oxyrhynchus Papyri collection at Oxford (you can read about the collection here) but presumably other universities will start doing the same.
At one point in my academic career, I was doing about as much work with papyri as someone who doesn't officially work with papyri and isn't a paleographer can. Now that I'm a Latinist, this won't impact me quite so directly, but like all the other classicists, I'm foaming at the mouth to see what they find next and digging up my old notes of "top ten works I wish we had." More Aeschylus, please! More lyric! Both of these are near-certainties, of course, so I will spare a thought for the prose works. The problem, of course, is one of length and genre -- 30 lines of Archilochus is quite a lot, but the same amount of Polybius or Xenophon isn't quite so useful, unless one is very lucky.
