http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/world/3210814
June 4, 2005, 5:43PM
Imaging technology makes ancient writings readable
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An Egyptian garbage dump 2,000 years old yields treasure trove of
scrolls
By GUY GUGLIOTTA
Washington Post
Two thousand years ago, Oxyrhynchus, "city of the sharp-nosed fish,"
was a provincial capital in central Egypt populated by the
well-educated descendants of Greek settlers.
It had an 11,000-seat theater, a religious cult dedicated to the city's
namesake � and a municipal dump on the outskirts of town.
People discarded trash there and probably never gave it a thought, and
through the years the mound grew to a height of 30 feet.
When archaeologists excavated it at the turn of the 20th century, they
found a treasure more precious than gold.
Buried in the dump were more than 400,000 fragments of papyrus � bits
of documents, pieces of scrolls and pages from old books written
between the 2nd century B.C. and the 8th century and preserved ever
since in the hot, dry climate.
For years, scholars have been trying to decipher these texts, which
include property records, epistles from the New Testament, writings
from early Islam and fragments of unknown works by the giants of
classical antiquity.
Painstaking pace
The pace of discovery has been painstaking, but this year scientists
brought an innovative imaging technology to the fragments, enabling
them to peer though the grime of centuries to see previously invisible
script while leaving the crumbling papyrus undamaged.
The technology, multispectral imaging, has dramatically increased the
recovery rate.
In a pass through a collection of Oxyrhynchus papyri at Oxford
University's Sackler Library last month, scholars turned up tantalizing
new bits of lost plays by Euripides, Sophocles and Menander and lost
lines from the poets Sappho, Hesiod and Archilochus.
"It's one of the most exciting things we've ever done," said Roger T.
Macfarlane, a classicist at Brigham Young University.
"There are pieces of papyrus that have gesso (a plaster) over the text,
but with the filters it's almost like X-ray vision," Macfarlane said.
Two largest finds
A BYU team led by Macfarlane has been using multispectral imaging since
1999.
The team members turned to the Oxyrhynchus fragments after focusing
first on the spectacular Villa of the Papyri, an entire Roman library
roasted in place during the famous volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius
that destroyed the towns of Herculaneum and Pompeii in A.D. 79.
Between them, the charred Herculaneum scrolls and the Oxyrhynchus trash
are the world's two largest known repositories of previously unread
ancient manuscripts � a collection of staggering potential.
"We have seven plays by Sophocles, and there are about 90 missing.
Euripides wrote 100 plays and Menander about 70," said Richard Janko, a
classicist at the University of Michigan.
"Herculaneum is the only place in the ancient world where a library has
been buried, and the garbage dump is almost as good," Janko said.
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