Researchers at the University of Colorado have concluded that papyrus fragments that appear to be a previously unknown sections of a tragedy by Euripides.
This is awesome:
After months of intense scrutiny, two University of Colorado Boulder scholars have deciphered and interpreted what they believe to be the most significant new fragments of works by classical Greek tragedian Euripides in more than half a century.
In November 2022, Basem Gehad, an archaeologist with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, sent a papyrus unearthed at the ancient site of Philadelphia in Egypt to Yvona Trnka-Amrhein, assistant professor of classics. The two scholars have also recently discovered the upper half of a colossal statue of the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II in their joint excavation project at Hermopolis Magna.
She began to pore over the high-resolution photo of the papyrus (Egyptian law prohibits physically removing any artifact from the country), scrutinizing its 98 lines.
“It was very clearly tragedy,” she says.
Using the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, a comprehensive, digitized database of ancient Greek texts maintained by the University of California, Irvine, Trnka-Amrhein confirmed she was looking at previously unknown excerpts from mostly lost Euripidean plays.
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Working together, Trnka-Amrhein and renowned classics Professor John Gibert embarked on many months of grueling work, meticulously poring over a high-resolution photo of the 10.5-square-inch papyrus. They made out words and ensured that the words they thought they were seeing fit the norms of tragic style and meter.
Eventually, they became confident that they were working with new material from two fragmentary Euripides plays, Polyidus and Ino. Twenty-two of the lines were previously known in slightly varied versions, but “80 percent was brand-new stuff,” Gibert says.
I can hear Mickey Rooney saying, "Hey, my dad found some lost papyri, let's put on a musical!"
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