“the ‘classical holy grail’ that may rewrite the history of the world”

How cool is this? The Independent today is reporting on how scientists are using new technology to uncover texts long thought unreadable from a pile of papyrus documents “discovered in an ancient rubbish dump in central Egypt.”

“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.”

This could well change our understanding of this world’s past, and most certainly our literary past. Wow.

via the wonderful site ArtsJournal, one of my first stops every day.