It's ok, AS, there are already innumerable works that you should read but won't. Just pretend none of this happened.
I wonder if they'll come up with more widely accessible technology? In my research from the 19th century I've come across plenty of faded letters that I'd like to (have) read.
In honor of the previous posts this sentence contains gratuitous grammar eras.
thanks Ogged! I read about this about a year ago and hadn't heard about it sense. I was seriously beginning to think a trick had been played on me. People! sober up and regret no longer your degrees in Ancient Greek! You now have a job!
this is just the most greatestest thing EVER. Michael: wait, I have a job now? sweet.
It may be a job, but even with the application of new technologies, anyone working on the Oxyrhynchus collection is still guaranteed to be both near-blind and at least partially insane after a few years of wrestling with that ancient rats' nest of papyrus, with pieces ranging in size from postage stamp to cocktail napkin. Classical epigraphers in their generations have wrestled with the Oxy, and mostly lost.
I'm not sure if there's an answer to this yet, or if they have to finish piecing it together first, but are they going to get any actual literature out of this? I mean, if we're talking about a collection of scraps that aren't going to get longer than a paragraph or so, that's interesting to a specialist, but I'm not all that personally excited. On the other hand, if we're talking about whole or reasonably large fragments of unknown works, that is fascinating.
I wondered that too, LB. I read three or four news stories and none answered the question. There's a wiki about the collection here.
The wiki gives a link to the main Oxyrhynchus site, which has pictures of some of the fragments, so that you can see just which kind of crazy jigsaw puzzle gig it is to get text out of this mess. The people at Oxford have been mining this cache for useful text since they started dragging it out of the desert back in the 1890s, and have by now published over 80 volumes of things that have been identified, from portions of plays by Sophocles, Euripdes, and Menander to government documents and personal correspondence.
Since for classical scholars these papyri are old news, I suspect one reason they are publicizing this portion of the project is that their government grant ends this year, and they want to make sure they have the support to get more money to continue sorting and assembling the bits and pieces.