New Greek discoveries

[Rune]

Are there still being made new discoveries of ancient Greek or Roman texts, or are we left to study what has already been discovered?

I read some years ago that some archaeologists had found some writings by Plato in Alexandria, but never heard anything more. Also I read about a new technique that made it possible to read the original content on paper reused in the middle-age. But I don’t know of any new texts being unearthed by this method.

[hobbes730]

Yes. Unfortunately I can’t back that up with any cites But I guaruntee you discoveries are still constantly being made. In fact, just last summer I visited an archealogical dig in southern Italy of a large ancient Roman port town. In the freshly excavated sections, we could even read the ancient graffiti written on the walls to inform citizens of gladiatorial contests, public executions and the such. Sadly, pollution (especially Nitric and Sulfuric acid in the air) degrades such markings within hours, so it has to be documented and preserved immediately or it is destroyed forever

[RotorHead]

Personal knowledge, with no available cite: when I was in college a few years back, my professor for a Greek language class left in the middle of the semester for a couple weeks, because he had been asked to translate some scripts somebody had found.

[Peter_Morris]

In fact, just last summer I visited an archealogical dig in southern Italy of a large ancient Roman port town. In the freshly excavated sections, we could even read the ancient graffiti written on the walls to inform citizens of gladiatorial contests, public executions and the such.

Kilrus hic erat?

[Exapno_Mapcase]

*Originally posted by WinstonSmith *
**Also I read about a new technique that made it possible to read the original content on paper reused in the middle-age. **

Not paper, but parchment or vellum, which were made from animal skins. These were extremely durable, but also expensive so older ones were reused by literally scraping the ink off their surfaces to create a newly blank page.

Sometimes the original writing can still be seen, in which case these are called palimpsests (from the Greek meaning scraped again). UV light can often bring to light even more completely erased writing and is now being used to try to determine original texts.

[Tuckerfan]

*Originally posted by Exapno Mapcase *
**Not paper, but parchment or vellum, which were made from animal skins. These were extremely durable, but also expensive so older ones were reused by literally scraping the ink off their surfaces to create a newly blank page.

Sometimes the original writing can still be seen, in which case these are called palimpsests (from the Greek meaning scraped again). UV light can often bring to light even more completely erased writing and is now being used to try to determine original texts. **

Right, one of Archimedes texts was recently rediscovered using such a method. (It turned out to be far more interesting than what was written over it, IIRC.)

[bonzer]

There’s a major research project underway to use modern technology to recover the texts of damaged manuscripts from a library discovered in Herculaneum.

*Originally posted by Tuckerfan *
Right, one of Archimedes texts was recently rediscovered using such a method. (It turned out to be far more interesting than what was written over it, IIRC.)

You’re presumably thinking of the so-called Method of Archimedes, a letter from him to Eratosthenes describing a forerunner of calculus. However, while this has had some media attention of late (IIRC the manuscript resurfaced after being lost), the original discovery of the text was by Heiberg back in 1906. Technically, the realisation that the palimpsest could be read and that it was a mathematical argument was made by someone else, but Heiberg read their paper, realised it was likely to be by Archimedes and followed it up, reading and publishing it in full. The Archimedes text was a 10th century copy, overwritten sometime between the 12th and 14th centuries.