Science Wednesday

Just when I think my blogging fate is instrinsicly tied to what I'd like to think is at least a bit of sanity--and a healthy dose of exasperation at wrong-wing lunacy--the gods have a bit of mercy and present me with something positive if not downright inspiring:

For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.

Andrew Leonard, writing in Salon (accessibile with a subscription or by watching an ad), cautions against being overly optimistic, noting that most of the material is fragmentary. But it's a hell of a lot better than nothing at all.

Let's just hope that present day politics won't cut scholars off from the region where the scrolls were found--the Middle East.