This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

One Man's Garbage . . .

In a Chicago Tribune article, we learn that NASA science uncovers texts of Trojan Wars, early gospel. If you like Greek, archaeology, and ancient history, this will make your day.

The scholars at Oxford University are not sure how it works or why; all they know is that it does.

A relatively new technology called multispectral imaging is turning a pile of ancient garbage into a gold mine of classical knowledge, bringing to light the lost texts of Sophocles and Euripides as well as some early Christian gospels that do not appear in the New Testament.

Originally developed by NASA scientists and used to map the surface of Mars, multispectral imaging was successfully applied to some badly charred Roman manuscripts that were buried during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Examining those carbonized manuscripts under different wavelengths of light suddenly revealed writing that had been invisible to scholars for two centuries.

Now scientists are shining the multispectral light on the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, an enormous collection of texts unearthed from the rubbish heaps of the vanished city of Oxyrhynchus, about 100 miles south of Cairo.

First excavated by two Oxford archeologists in the late 19th Century, the hoard of papyrus from Oxyrhynchus has long been a source of fascination and frustration for scholars: Fascination because it holds some of the lost masterpieces of classical literature, frustration because much of it is in such poor condition it's impossible to read. . . .

In the past few weeks alone, researchers have succeeded in deciphering a 70-line fragment from a lost tragedy by Sophocles and a 30-line fragment from Archilochos, a Greek soldier-poet who chronicled the Trojan Wars.

The Archilochos fragment confirms what scholars have long suspected: that the Greeks got lost on their way to invade Troy and mistakenly landed at place called Mysia. There they fought a battle, lost and had to regroup before heading off again for Troy.

The Archilochos fragment will be published later this month. The newly discovered lines from Sophocles are scheduled for publication in August. . . .

The Oxyrhynchus collection, housed at Oxford University's Sackler Library, consists of more than half a million scraps of papyrus. Some of it is in excellent condition, but much of it is worm-eaten and darkened by time.

All of it was collected from the rubbish dumps of Oxyrhynchus, a city that flourished after the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C. The city remained prominent in the Roman and Byzantine periods but declined after the Arab conquest in A.D. 641.

For a thousand years, the inhabitants dumped their trash in the desert. Over time the dumpsites were covered by sand, and they remained covered until 1896 when Oxford archeologists Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt began excavating the area.

At first, Grenfell thought that what he and Hunt had found was "nothing but rubbish mounds," but they quickly came to appreciate that they had found a remarkable window into the literary and ordinary lives of the ancients.

There were plays by Sophocles and Euripides, poems of Pindar and Sappho, and some of the earliest documents recording Christianity's spread to Egypt. The gospel of Thomas, for example, records the "Sayings of Jesus" in a manner that some scholars of early Christianity believe is more authentic than the Gospels in the New Testament.