Reflections, Reflections

Update April 24:
Someone who seems to have good reasons to question the news on this wrote:

Of course I was excited, but the story rang a few alarm bells. First, as I mentioned above, I'm reading some of these texts in class with papyrologist David Martinez, who specializes in Egyptian papyri and would be one of the first people to know if there were any major breakthroughs coming out. Usually, rumors of any really big news in this fairly obscure field circulate through a very small grapevine before bubbling up into the mainstream media. Surely work as earth-shattering as that described in the news article wouldn't be totally unknown to the rest of the papyrology field, and if my professor did know about it then it certainly would've gotten a mention by now.

Another problem with the story is that it implies that the Oxyrhynchus texts are this hidden hoard of texts that we just can't read, and this breakthrough will somehow magically unlock all of them and make them instantaneously readable. Certainly many of these texts are damaged to the point where the letters are hard to make out, but the really big problems arise not so much from deciphering the letter forms as from piecing together numerous small but individually legible fragments into the proper order. And often when fragments are fitted together, there are huge gaps in the text, called lacunae, where text is missing. As the Independent article does indeed mention, the Oxyrhynchus collection is a lot like the world's most vexing jigsaw puzzle. But no amount of spectral analysis is going to solve the problem of how to put the pieces back together.

And then there's the fact that infrared imaging and multispectral analysis of the Oxyrhynchus papyri has been going on for over two decades. In the aforementioned seminar's introductory lecture, Martinez described these techniques, so it's not like using IR and multispectral analysis on these texts is a new thing.

[read more...]

Are the Oxford professor folks featured in the news just another academic bunch using the media to make a hype of something so that they can vie for a salary increase or some larger funding to their research?

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Posted April 19:
Article by David Keys and Nicholas Pyke from the Independent

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.

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 (see wikipedia), 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.

Suspense...

See also Nag Hammadi at wikipedia.

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Update April 18:
Comment from Blogcritics.org:

Personally, I'm a big fan of Sophocles, and hope to read his newly discovered works as soon as it's translated.

SFC SKI:

Great, now I'll be even further behind on my reading.

:-)

Update April 19:
And, if I had ever known the following Egypt history passage, I had completely forgotten:

Egypt was Christianized during the first century A.D., when the country was part of the Roman Empire. The Coptic Church claims to hold an unbroken line of patriarchal succession to the See of Alexandria founded by Saint Mark, a disciple of Christ. Egyptian Christianity developed distinct dogmas and practices during the more than two centuries that the religion was illegal. By the fourth century, when Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, Coptic traditions were sufficiently different from those in Rome and Constantinople (formerly Byzantium; present-day Istanbul) to cause major religious conflicts. Dissension persisted for 150 years until most Copts seceded from the main body of Christianity because they rejected the decision of the Council of Chalcedon that Christ had a dual nature, both human and divine, believing instead in Christ's single, divine nature.

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