Papyrus

There's a very exciting piece of paper right now. Some scraps of papyrus that have been unintelligible for decades has had some new technology used upon it that may rewrite classical history. This is known as the Oxyrhynchus collection, salvaged from an ancient Egyptian garbage dump.

From a historical standpoint, this is amazing. Absolutely new and believed to be lost writings of Sophocles and Hesiod, among others, are on those scraps. The ancient world has been illuminated from a new perspective. New documents will shed light on a time that has been very dark.

From a literature perspective, this is like finding the holy grail. They've known for years that Sophocles wrote dozens of plays but we only have a handful remaining to this day. I'm talking about world-renowned plays like Antigone and Oedipus Rex. These works are still studied to this day. I taught Antigone to tenth graders just two years ago. These are seminal works. I am very interested to see how these "new" literary works fit into modern literature and culture. I sort of think of it as dropping Citizen Kane and Casablanca on a modern audience, as is, that have never seen the movies. Would they make the impact? Will we be able to see the influence upon our modern stuff?

I am just flabbergasted by this discovery. I will be keeping up with this topic.