Message #260340

[Cleopatra]

By Michael Gordon   Wed, Sep 07, 2011

The discovery of the world's largest trove of ancient writings opened an unparalleled window on a vanished world.
From the Sands of Egypt

El-Behnesa, Egypt, 1896. There was little to see. It was a landscape of windblown sand surrounding a sleepy arab village. But for Bernard P. Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt, young English scholars of classicism from the Queen's College in Oxford, there was something about the place that screamed at them. Set astride a small river that anciently served as a canal of the Nile, they knew it was the location of two ancient cities, the more ancient called Per-Medjed, a capital of the Egyptian 19th Dynasty, and the younger called Oxyrhynchus Polis (meaning "City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish"), a Greco-Roman town initially under the Ptolemaic rulership of 3rd-1st century B.C. Egypt. But all that could be seen of them today was a lone, well-weathered Greek column and a few traces of stone-lines and banks of sand that only hinted at the city's ancient presence. The site was nothing like the visual splendor that greeted explorers and adventurers at places like Luxor, Giza, and Abu Simbel. 

But Grenfell and Hunt (pictured right) were not interested in architecture. They were interested in researching ancient papyri, and having recently excavated in the Fayum area, the region surrounding the well-known ancient Egyptian site of Crocodilios, they had hopes that this new, relatively obscure site might yield something significant.

 

The Motherlode

As it turned out, they were right......but far more than they had ever imagined.

Securing the help of 200 local men from the nearby village of El-Behnesa, they began digging into mounds that anciently served as garbage dumps for the refuse of centuries of succeeding human generations. For a thousand years, the inhabitants of ancient Oxyrhynchus had dumped their garbage in mounds outside the city, and for another thousand years, the intensely dry climate and winds of sand had covered them into oblivion. 

The digging was not easy.  Battling strong winds that stung the skin and threatened the eyes, they toiled undaunted through an Egyptian winter season, digging down inch by inch until their efforts were finally rewarded in January of 1897.

They found papyrus. It began as a trickle. Then the site generously yielded one papyrus fragment or bundle after another until the layers seemed to virtually flow with papyri.

The first major find to emerge from the sand was a papyrus that contained, in Greek script, what was later translated as the Gospel of Thomas, an apocryphal work that was never canonized into the New Testament of the Bible. Three manuscripts were unearthed.  They are to this day the only known manuscripts of the Gospel of Thomas in Greek.  The only other manuscript was written in coptic, discovered later among the finds at Nag Hammadi, also in Egypt. A fragment of the Gospel of Matthew followed soon after. The finds were astonishing, not so much because of the biblical references, but because of the sheer mass of the discovery. By the time Grenfell and Hunt's excavations had ended in 1907, there were enough papyri to fill 700 boxes, a total of 500,000 fragments that made their way back to Oxford, England, for preparation and study.