Egypt
- Oxford University Wants Help Decoding Egyptian Papyri
BBC News Oxford University is asking for help deciphering ancient Greek texts written on fragments of papyrus found in Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of images have gone on display on a website which encourages armchair archaeologists to help catalogue...
- Book Review: Greetings In The Lord
Bryn Mawr Classical Review (review by Roberta Mazza) AnneMarie Luijendijk, Greetings in the Lord: Early Christians and the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. Harvard Theological Studies 60. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Divinity School, 2008. The city of Oxyrhynchus has...
- Oxyrhynchus - The Dustbin Of History
Guardian Unlimited (Khaled Diab) Our collective memory of the past is mostly confined to grand figures and epic events, while the vast majority of humanity ends up in the wastelands of oblivion. Thanks to nearly half a million papyrus fragments uncovered...
- Book Review: The City Of The Sharp-nosed Fish
http://www.newstatesman.com/200704230045Another review of City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: Greek lives in Roman Egypt by Peter Parsons Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 320pp, ISBN 0297645889. Review by William Dalrymple."Much of the excitement of Parsons's...
- The Oxyrhynchus Papyri
The article from Biblical Archaeological Review is on the discovery of papyri at the beginning of the last century near the Upper Egyptian village of el-Behnesa. Two Oxford scholars named Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt were searching the...
Egypt
Book Review: City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish
The Periscope Post (Review by Philip Womack)
This time it’s a star turn for Peter Parson’s City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: Greek Lives in Roman Egypt (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007). This charming, entertaining and informative book is not only easy to read, it also delights with its clear-sighted analysis of the papyrus fragments found at the site of the Egyptian city of Oxyrhyncos. Here, in the early twentieth century, the archaeologists Grenfell and Hunt stumbled upon a classicist’s dream – mounds and mounds of intact papyroi.
“I make obeisance on your behalf every day before the Lord God Serapis. From the day you left we miss your turds, wishing to see you.”
A few of them gave up texts of Homer; there was a lost play of Euripides, Hypsipyle, (which it is thought concerns the cursing of a group of women by Aphrodite for neglecting her shrine; her curse was to give them all extreme body odour. Perhaps that’s why it was lost.) There were songs of Sappho (who features in a Ronald Firbank novel, Vainglory, in which a professor reads out, proudly, the fragment to assembled high society: “Could not (he wagged a finger) Could not, for the fury of her feet!”) and other Greek lyricists. But most were prosaic, and as such add a huge amount to our knowledge and understanding of life at the height of the Roman Empire, just before Christianity.
- Oxford University Wants Help Decoding Egyptian Papyri
BBC News Oxford University is asking for help deciphering ancient Greek texts written on fragments of papyrus found in Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of images have gone on display on a website which encourages armchair archaeologists to help catalogue...
- Book Review: Greetings In The Lord
Bryn Mawr Classical Review (review by Roberta Mazza) AnneMarie Luijendijk, Greetings in the Lord: Early Christians and the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. Harvard Theological Studies 60. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Divinity School, 2008. The city of Oxyrhynchus has...
- Oxyrhynchus - The Dustbin Of History
Guardian Unlimited (Khaled Diab) Our collective memory of the past is mostly confined to grand figures and epic events, while the vast majority of humanity ends up in the wastelands of oblivion. Thanks to nearly half a million papyrus fragments uncovered...
- Book Review: The City Of The Sharp-nosed Fish
http://www.newstatesman.com/200704230045Another review of City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: Greek lives in Roman Egypt by Peter Parsons Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 320pp, ISBN 0297645889. Review by William Dalrymple."Much of the excitement of Parsons's...
- The Oxyrhynchus Papyri
The article from Biblical Archaeological Review is on the discovery of papyri at the beginning of the last century near the Upper Egyptian village of el-Behnesa. Two Oxford scholars named Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt were searching the...