Reading the Past... with SCIENCE

So classicists at Oxford have teamed up with a team of scientists from Brigham Young University to decipher a huge trove of text fragments from the classical word. The collection of over 400,000 fragments (an estimated 5 million words) was found about 100 years ago in an ancient dump outside the Greek-Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus. The fragments are mostly illegible to the human eye and even advanced forensics techniques, but new technology can cause the ink residues on the ancient paper to glow, allowing it to be detected by infrared readers and photographed. Already researchers have announced that they have found fragments of a lost play by Sophocles, poetry by Hesiod and Archilochos, and so on. They estimate most of it will be the classical equivalent of pulp fiction, but still expect to increase the number of classical texts by 1/5th. In other words, it should keep classical scholars busy for decades, and might make your old copy of Homer (or Heraclitus) obsolete. You can read all about it here.