On the timescale it's like getting buried today with a copy of Beowulf.
Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy
51–60 of 274 posts
Re: Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy
#52Re: Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
It wasn't a whole book, it was cartonnage: scrap paper from discarded books and documents, assembled and glued together like papier-mâché. The cartonnage was used to make funerary masks and some other parts of the mummification apparatus. There is a whole subfield of archaeology that deals with deciphering and identifying book fragments found in the form of scrap paper in Greco-Roman era Egyptian mummies.
I find it interesting how uncommon it is for this to yield new works. It seems like it's always the same handful of texts. Ancient readers liked what they liked and weren't out for variety it seems. At the same time, Juvenal has a whole satire about how everyone is trying their hand at writing books and mentions in another how booksellers are always getting new volumes. I spend way too much time pining for the chance…
I imagine it's easier to attribute a fragment of writing to a well known work, rather than a previously unknown one.
Re: Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy
#54It’s heartbreaking to think of what treasures were lost when they were using mummies as locomotive fuel in the 19th century.
Re: Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy
#55It’s heartbreaking to think of what treasures were lost when they were using mummies as locomotive fuel in the 19th century.
wtf I’m going to wager that this is a local myth. Just using corpses as fuel feels a bit antithetical to human traditions
Re: Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
As well, both the Iliad and Vedas are originally oral traditions. Likely there were different versions and different parts of the stories were emphasized to appeal to their audiences and local tastes and current events. Something that can still be apparent in historical texts but probably greatly reduced by the function of printed versions presenting a singular "authoritative version."
The Vedas are surprisingly uniform across a very long time period.
It's likely that there have been bottlenecks, where a single written version became the main common ancestor to copy from. Long after the oral tradition died down and other written versions were lost. Or because some patron decided to fund the dissemination of a particular copy, like Guttemberg or King James, or the Toledo School of Translators. Or because a particular heir of the oral tradition wrote it down, like Homer.
It doesn't necessarily mean that the story was stable, it's just the version that got to us.
Re: Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Library almost certainly existed. It is the destruction (by deliberate fire) that is probably myth.
Its destruction multiple times (in sieges and uncontrolled fires) is current historical consensus.
The sieges and fires you are referring to were hundreds of years before the supposed destruction at the hands of Christian mobs (e.g. as depicted in the movie Agora or in Sagan’s Cosmos). The latter is unsupported.
Re: Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy
#58I Hope more and more fragments of anything lost is found. The burn down of Alexandria library was a pity
It is not an uncommon view among scholars that humidity and age caused more papyri to be lost than the burning down of the library of Alexandria did. Many of which would have survived by being repeatedly copied and disseminated throughout the region.
Re: Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy
#59It’s heartbreaking to think of what treasures were lost when they were using mummies as locomotive fuel in the 19th century.
wtf I’m going to wager that this is a local myth. Just using corpses as fuel feels a bit antithetical to human traditions
They were actually eaten (in the early modern era) or ground up for paint.
Re: Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy
#60That's a head scratcher.
Why did the person have that fragment? Was it like a comic book or something?