![[Grenfell and Hunt's hired diggers gather papyrus fragments in a basket]](../images/scraps.jpg)
the diggers unearth scraps of papyrus
the diggers unearth scraps of papyrus
The traditional classical world leaves us no actual books: the great Library of Alexandria, the twenty-eight public libraries of imperial Rome have disappeared without trace. We are left with copies of copies, chance survivals through the Empire and Middle Ages. We have ideas of what’s missing, but these losses seemed final.
Sporadically and in fragments, the dumps of Oxyrhynchus are changing all that. Oxyrhynchus restores to us authors famous in classical times, who went under in the Middle Ages: the songs of Sappho, the sitcom of Menander, the elegant and learned elegies of Callimachus that Roman poets liked to boast of imitating. These Egyptian Greeks read Greek tragedies that to us had just been names — and the satyr plays that went with them.
Tony Harrison’s Trackers of Oxyrhynchus at Delphi: modern play, ancient fragments