Re-Discoveries of Ancient Texts

Someone just posted a comment asking if I could write about "how they're looking for lost texts."

First of all, thanks for the comment. It's always nice to hear from a reader. It hasn't happened enough yet that it's even beginning to get old.

But, to be honest, I can't really say much that I haven't said in other posts. And the most important thing I have to say is: ask an expert. I'm not an expert. If you're interested in ancient Jewish texts or early Christian texts, then ask a Professor who specializes in biblical studies, or early Christianity, or biblical archaeology, or some related field. If you're interested in ancient, non-Christian Greek or Latin, ask a professor of Classics.

I should ask these professors more questions myself.

If there's anyone out there who's read all of the posts in this blog -- first of all, thank you -- and also, the following will be somewhat repetitive for you.

My especial interest is in Latin, and I know less about ancient texts in other languages than I know about Latin. Most of the recent discoveries of ancient texts, as far as I know (check with an expert!) have been in Greek, Coptic, Aramaic, and Hebrew.

The biggest thing that's happening these days in re-discovering ancient texts, the biggest just in terms of sheer volume of texts, is the project concerning the tremendous number of scraps of papyri found by Oxford professors Bernard Grenville and Arthur Hunt around the turn of the 20th century at Oxyrhynchus, the site of an ancient city in Egypt.

These papyri, ironically, have been found in garbage dumps. What people threw away in Oxyrhynchus between the 3rd century BC and the 6th century AD is precious treasure to us today. Grenville and Hunt found so many pieces of papyrus at Oxyrhynchus that, to this day, more than a century later, scholars are still editing and publishing them, and have still only published a small fraction of the entire find. Almost all of the Oxyrhynchus papyri are written in Greek, but there are also some written in Latin, Coptic and other languages. They include Bible passages and other Christian writings, Classical Greek literature (and a tiny amount of Classical Latin), personal letters, official government documents and more. Most of the ancient texts being re-discovered these days are in Greek.

Next, after Oxyrhynchus, I suppose, would be the numerous pieces of papyrus and parchment which turn up here and there at random in the Middle East, both at archaeological digs and at antiquities markets. Some of the texts which appear at these markets are modern forgeries, unfortunately, but many are genuine.

Then there are palimpsests. A palimpsest occurs when a piece of writing is scraped off of a parchment and something else is written on it. The palimpsest is the identations left by the earlier writing. And scholars have found ways to read those texts, even thought the ink is now gone.

Then there is cartonnage: papyrus which was made into a material sort of like cardboard and made into the coverings of mummies or book covers. Some very clever scholars have found ways to take this material back apart into the original papyrus and read what is written on it.

There is a large amount of Medieval Latin writing contained in archives in Europe. Medieval scholars are going through these archives, preserving as much as they can. Some have expressed the concerned that they may not be able preserve everything before the parchments rot away.

And every now and then -- say, every few years or so -- a lost ancient Latin text is re-discovered by some means which doesn't fit into any of the above categories.

That sums up what I know, but, again, the people to ask would be professors of Classsical Greek and Latin, biblical scholars, archaeologists and so forth.