Slashdot Log In
Digitizing Literary Treasures Leads To New Finds
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sat May 09, 2009 04:14 AM
from the bits-and-scraps dept.
from the bits-and-scraps dept.
storagedude writes "The WSJ has a cool article on how the race to digitize literary treasures has led to a trove of new discoveries. Quoting: 'Improved technology is allowing researchers to scan ancient texts that were once unreadable — blackened in fires or by chemical erosion, painted over or simply too fragile to unroll. Now, scholars are studying these works with X-ray fluorescence, multispectral imaging used by NASA to photograph Mars and CAT scans used by medical technicians ... By taking high-resolution digital images in 14 different light wavelengths, ranging from infrared to ultraviolet, Oxford scholars are reading bits of papyrus that were discovered in 1898 in an ancient garbage dump in central Egypt. So far, researchers have digitized about 80% of the collection of 500,000 fragments, dating from the 2nd century B.C. to the 8th century A.D. The texts include fragments of unknown works by famous authors of antiquity, lost gospels and early Islamic manuscripts.'"
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Oxyrhynchus (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone who majored in Classics as an undergraduate, I've long been captivated by the massive papyrus finds finds at the Oxyrhynchus site in Egypt. The site has been well-explored for over a century, and many of the papyri have already been deciphered and published. The Biblical texts there have gotten the most attention, but one shouldn't neglect the important literary finds as well. See Bowman's Oxyrhynchus: A City and its Texts [amazon.com] for a nice introduction. Over the last few years, there's been more work with using new technologies to examine manuscripts that otherwise can't be deciphered. Classics may seem an unsexy and superseded field, but in fact with digital technology the field is living in exciting times.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Classics sounds a lot like biology then. Information theory, statistics and fast cheap computers have opened up a lot of fields for math geeks. It seems that physics is not longer the only academic application of mathematics.
Re:Oxyrhynchus (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Oxyrhynchus (Score:4, Insightful)
Chances are 99.99% that ancient porn was lost
Parent
Re:Oxyrhynchus (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
In addition to Oxyrhynchus, significant finds have been made at Herculaneum and Pompeii.
If those ones take your fancy more than the ones from Oxyrhynchos -- and there are some good reasons why they might -- you might find it useful to have these links at your disposal:
Catalogue of Women (Score:3, Funny)
I ca
Apply sarcasm here.... (Score:2)
You Pirates!!!
The Author's Guild will be in touch as soon as they are done with Google!
All joking aside, I'll bet it is exciting times, and I wish you all well.
*said with envy*
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Troll? The guy was just joking. I mean, look at this recent exciting find (in Ancient Greek):
Things I Need
-------------
bread
fish (fresh not the day-old stuff)
snail
brain of goat
flour (weevils removed)
sheepskin condom
cow dung
Wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
I sometimes wonder of our knowledge of great people events and stories from the past; we only know about the ones that were documented or were very famous. Imagine what fantastic times may have existed that history has just forgotten.
Digitization seems to be uncovering some of these.
Re: (Score:2)
Well the biggest problem is that hand written artefacts date back to early babylon but not older, I doubt we will rediscover something significant history wise giving us new knowledge, but we will rediscover some known lost books.
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah well, history has always been written by the victors.
Having said that, this news is 'news' indeed.
And, you have a valid point that your imagination could be achieved:
Imagine what fantastic times may have existed that history has just forgotten.
Don't ever let anyone take that from you, kiddo!
That's how many of these questions get answered...by people like you.
"Imagine what/if..." is a very powerful 'spell' to cast, and has brought us a long way!
not only papyrus (Score:2, Interesting)
Jesus (Score:2)
That is very interesting. Maybe they find evidence of the existence of Jesus, or maybe text about his life that were written when he was still actually on Earth.
Re:Jesus (Score:4, Insightful)
There is already evidence for the existence of Jesus - the fact that he was an historical figure is pretty much accepted. Proof that he was actually God - now, that would be the big thing! It's not going to be found, though, for one of two reasons:
a) If it were proven, there would be no more need for faith, and that would undermine the whole raison d'etre of religion.
or
b) It isn't true.
I subscribe to b); YMMV.
Parent
Re:Jesus (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually even in early christianity there were two strong philiosophical roots one Arianism just said Christ was not god but a messenger from god, the other one was the Trinitarism was the one chosen by the council of Nicea.
Now take it with a grain of salt, Muslims basically reject Christianity because of trinitarism and follow more the course of early Arianism in their view of god, while many catholic mystics had visions which basically fortified trinitarity.
But in the end, is it really important, I always saw such things as things which distract people from the core of the message which over all this mumbo jumbo seems to be forgotten, and the message is one of peace, forgiveness, trying to help others and no violence!
(This is one of the reasons why I feel so uneasy among many christian groups they simply do not represent the message, I am christian myself, often those who shout loudest we are so holy are the worst by ignoring the core of the message!)
Parent
Fire Extinguisher warning.... (Score:3, Funny)
Wow!
I mean, wow!
I was ready to jump in this thread to deposit my 'two cents' worth as a Buddhist, but this caught my attention first.
But in the end, is it really important, I always saw such things as things which distract people from the core of the message which over all this mumbo jumbo seems to be forgotten, and the message is one of peace, forgiveness, trying to help others and no violence!
Very well done! If I wore a hat, it would be 'tipped' in your direction. /., but appreciated when pulled off.
Thank you for an 'intelligent' and rational comment in the favor of religion. Not easily done on
That was an effective 'stroke to the heart' of many religious fundamentalist's main arguments defending their agenda while abandoning the core 'cause'.
Again, wow!
And thanks f
Re: (Score:3)
There is already evidence for the existence of Jesus - the fact that he was an historical figure is pretty much accepted.
There is no good hard evidence for the existence of Jesus. Every supposed account of his existence by historians of the day was second- or third-hand. There was an ossary collected which read "James Brother of Jesus" but the brother of Jesus part was added by a different hand which could mean anything.
That doesn't mean that he didn't exist, or contradict your statement; but every textual reference to his life which is not in the bible is worthless; and the bible is so heavily edited and redacted that it's v
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, evidence, which falls into 3 categories :
-Christian texts from the late 1st century onwards
-Non-christian texts from the 2nd century onwards
-Jewish records of a guy named vaguely like him executed by hanging for robbery about a decade after Jesus was supposed to have died.
Add to that the fact that Jews back then kept a record of pretty much everything they did but no records for anything that happened in the New Testament, be it the mass execution of toddlers or the execution of Jesus, that cont
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That is very interesting. Maybe they find evidence of the existence of Jesus, or maybe text about his life that were written when he was still actually on Earth.
Well there is historical evidence, you just have to read the Bellum Judaicum by Flavius Josephus, the most important historian of this time and he has a special 10 liner about Jesus (speaking very favorable about him although he was not christian/jewish).
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
...which is widely regarded in academic circles to be inserted by a much later author
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Does this technology work on Slashdot posts? (Score:5, Funny)
I seem to find many to be unreadable.
Mostly, the ones that I write.
Red Dwarf (Score:5, Funny)
Good evening. Here is the news on Friday, the 27th of Geldof. Archaeologists near mount Sinai have discovered what is believed to be a missing page from the Bible. The page is currently being carbon dated in Bonn. If genuine it belongs at the beginning of the Bible and is believed to read "To my darling Candy. All characters portrayed within this book are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental." The page has been universally condemned by church leaders.
Re:Better not show those "Lost gospels" to the chu (Score:5, Informative)
Which church? There are thousands of denominations which reject non-canonical gospels.
The popular media perpetuates this myth that non-canonical gospels reveal truths suppressed by mainstream Christianity. That's just not the case. Even non-Christian historians find most non-canonical gospels less reliable as history than the canonical gospels, being written still decades later and are often by their own admission non-historical.
English translations of many non-canonical gospels have been pretty easily available for a 100 years already. Churches aren't conspiring to keep them in the dark. If they have been little read, it's because they really aren't worth much.
Parent
Re:Better not show those "Lost gospels" to the chu (Score:4, Informative)
Well to the media a conspiracy theory sells better than the plain truth...
Please also tell that to Dan Brown before he spills out his next badly researched book full of historical errors!
Those gospels have been known for ages and have been omitted in the 5th century for many reasons one of them in many cases was that they were unreliable and often written by third parties trying to promote an agenda. Have in mind early christianity was split way more than we are today and everyone could run his/her religious and monetary agenda on top of the religion.
Often those gospels also were folk tales written down which can be attributed to the area of folk legends nothing more!
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
And how, exactly does this differ from the Catholic-approved books? I'm not trying to be insulting here, just making a point. The Pauline epistles are letters written to various peoples arguing specific aspects of early Christian theology. The gospels include many aspects that w
Re: (Score:2)
Well for one some of the gospels at least back then could be dated exactly to persons surrounding jesus followers, and others omitted clearly showed up way later then the one canoninized or clearly showed gnostic influences which crawled up way later in christianity. I dont know too much about the early history, but the entire council of Nicea is well documented and written philosophical texts way before that so a person with good historical and religious background can give you more insight why exactly the
Re:Better not show those "Lost gospels" to the chu (Score:4, Insightful)
Please also tell that to Dan Brown before he spills out his next badly researched book full of historical errors!
Ahh. Another one who doesn't understand the differences between "fiction" and "non fiction".
I do but DB obviously doesnÂt if you follow his interviews. I once made the mistake to open his latest books alone in the description of the time of Constantine and the Council of Nicea he made several historical mistakes intermixing events which often occurred within 150 years!
Just to prove his point.
I dont have a problem with him doing that, my problem with him is that he then talks in front of the camera how long he has researched and he is right on things, while the history books say clearly he is wrong.
Those gospels have been known for ages and have been omitted in the 5th century for many reasons one of them in many cases was that they were unreliable and often written by third parties trying to promote an agenda. Have in mind early christianity was split way more than we are today and everyone could run his/her religious and monetary agenda on top of the religion.
Often those gospels also were folk tales written down which can be attributed to the area of folk legends nothing more!
And how exactly is that different from the other "accepted" gospels?
You can see that by the historical dates, in which area the gospels can be attributed to and which philosophical context they are. A gnostic gospel for instance easily immediately can be ommitted because gnosticism never made it into christianity before 100 AC also you pretty much have the date of the first occurrence of each gospel and other non canonized texts by historical letters preserved until today.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Dan Brown doesn't bill his books as historical fiction. The publisher sort-of does, but in radio interviews Mr. Brown presents his books as an expose of the Vatican.
Re: (Score:2)
"Non-canonical gospels"? As opposed to pre-Christian Gnostic and related texts that shed light on the true origins of Christianity? Talk about using a razor blade to make subtle distinctions. And while we're on the subject, the digitization of 19th Century antiquarian works has brought back into the public debate ideas that are supported by surviving ancient texts but ignored by modern archaeologists who would rather dig up a pot than read a text in Greek or Coptic.
Re: (Score:2)
"Non-canonical gospels"? As opposed to pre-Christian Gnostic and related texts that shed light on the true origins of Christianity?
Wrong, Gnosticism was sort of a meta religion which existed outside of Christianity when it arrived at the scene, remember first christianity started as a judaic side religion.
Gnosticims made it into Christianity to my knowledge after 100 AC as one of the influences which influenced christianity heavily, the other was greek pholosophy like stoism. There are well documented disputes of early christian philosophers and the entire gnostic angle of early christianity is well documented!
Have in mind such things are normal when you dont have a clear canon nor a central religious authority. Heaves, simply look at all the splits protestantic churces had the last 300 years to having no central religious authority. So assume this tenfold in early christianity, with Arianism, Trinitarism running wild, later even Gnisticism came to the mix. And everyone was working on his/her own canon or stories.
What you can do in such a situation is try to make a canon which tries to be as accurate as possible in its historical roots and omit newer ones. The biggest issue back than AFAIK was the split between Trinitarism and Arianism, which was finally resolved in the council of Nicea, Gnostic sects always were seen as non christians by the bigger streams of early christianity and were rather late to the table!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You are kidding, right? (Score:5, Interesting)
Fundamentalists are proof to the world that Satan does, in fact, exists.
You bring up a good point, the best way to poison the good roots of any religion is to grow fundamentalists. Those usually are the people who kill others for some stupid parts of something they do not understand while the core message is, do not kill people, do not harm others.
The funny thing is fundamentalists are exactly those Jesus fought against in the bible in the sections where he constantly broke jewish law for the sake of helping others. It was constantly that he tried to give a message of freedom to the people while the fundamentalists tried to frame him for not following their law of trying to lock the people into myriads of rites they have to follow!
Parent
Re:FP (Score:5, Insightful)
Good, now put them online.
Do ten seconds' googling and you'll find it was done long ago [163.1.169.40] (notice the turn-of-the-century character of the website; believe me, it used to be worse).
Well, it's been partly done. That link only gives digitised images of the papyri that have been published in hardcopy so far -- i.e. the first hundred-odd years of publications. It'll take another few hundred years to finish publishing the Oxyrhynchos papyri.
On the other hand, actually reading the material -- here's [163.1.169.40] a sample of someone practising their handwriting, see how you get on with reading it -- will still be considerably more trouble than it would be if you simply went to a library and looked at a printed text.
Either way, of course, you'll have to learn ancient Greek first. Alas, if you want a translation, you're out of luck. I'm sure Oxford University would be glad if you want to donate the millions of pounds it would require to translate the entire corpus, ... translation isn't cheap. It's simply more economical to impose an entry requirement for studying the material, viz. a knowledge of ancient Greek (and of Hellenistic palaeography), than it would be to find non-existent funding for a translation.
Parent
MOD PARENT UP (Score:3, Insightful)
(*) unlikely to be good enough for scholars, but at the very least a worthy PR exercise.
OCR isn't there yet. (Score:5, Interesting)
OCR's great, and handwriting recognition can be made to work with sufficient training. But handwriting styles before printing often involved abbreviation (in highly inflected languages too, which means that their expansion is dependent not only on grammar, but on the sense). Moreover, in pre-printing handwriting, often the shape of the word matters less than the motion of the pen that it describes, so OCR as such wouldn't work -- you'd need Optical Word recognition. The only problem there is that before the 17th Century, the notion of orthography (aka proper spelling) was very fluid. Finally, all these parameters: abbreviation style, character and word formation, spelling, all have a range and style that is heavily dependent on the scribe and time involved. Since we have (for computing purposes) very little data, the piece being scanned helps define those parameters.
Even top experts in the field read texts wrong from time to time. Even for a machine to produce a quick-n-dirty transcription (to say nothing of translation) would be an expensive proposition that would have to be extensively checked and corrected by an expert. At that point, I could just transcribe it myself much faster and more accurately.
So I'm saying that my job is safe for the time-being, since it's still several orders of magnitude cheaper to have trained experts transcribe and translate than to figure out how to teach a computer to do it (and the applications are wider).
Parent
Re:FP (Score:5, Interesting)
Well doesn't that bring to mind the original principle of censorship, not to protect the people but to protect the leaders from wrath of the people. One might wonder whether more truth might be found in an ancient garbage dump than in a ancient royal library.
Parent
Re:FP (Score:5, Informative)
Well doesn't that bring to mind the original principle of censorship, not to protect the people but to protect the leaders from wrath of the people. One might wonder whether more truth might be found in an ancient garbage dump than in a ancient royal library.
Actually if you want to know what you might find in an ancient garbage dump just look at Pompeii most of the stuff to be found at the walls or ruins are pornography, ancient advertisements (especially for hookers) and political graffity.
So nothing really changes!
Parent
Dumpers (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed.
And keep in mind what was going on at the time: The religion of Mithra was growing in the West; the Gnostics were a force to be reckoned with in Egypt; and the followers of the 1st Century BC Yeshu(a) the Nazar were slowly morphing into the so-called Christians. We may finally get a glimpse of the true historical origins of Christianity unvarnished by the official Church authorities, before and just after Constantine took the major religions of the Roman Empire and merged them into a single syncretistic faith.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually the glimpse always has been there, all we get is probably some texts known but lost in history.
Everybody interested into history might have gotten access to the most important texts of that era way before 1800 they never were lost and all the christian roots were known in the old historians books from the roman era!
But what is lost definitely are important works by ancient authors!
But I guess most you can get is profanity in documents freshly scanned! The ancient world was way more open to sex than
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A good point. And the digitization work of Google has refreshed awareness of the meaning of surviving texts studied by the antiquarians of the 19th Century, especially the more heretical characters like Rev. Robert Taylor.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Imagine what historians of several centuries in the future will think when they find that "archeological treasure trove" of bukkake, goatse, and tubgirl.
Do we have any digital media that lasts that long? I don't think any of those are very prevalent in longer-lasting media such as paper, wood, stone, or plastic. So unless we find new ways to read the corrupted data much like what WSJ is doing with the manuscripts, most of our illicit material will decay.
Isn't there a reason why we have cliché's about prostitution as the oldest profession
How does this mean the ancient world wasn't more open about it?
Re:Dumpers (Score:5, Funny)
Keep in mind what was going on at the time: The religion of Mithra was growing in the West; the Gnostics were a force to be reckoned with in Egypt; and the followers of the 1st Century BC Yeshu(a) the Nazar were slowly morphing into the so-called Christians.
Ah, I remember it well. It seems like only yesterday.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Leto II, you old bastard! How's that whole "pearls of awareness" thing working out for you?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:FP (Score:4, Funny)
You're kidding right? (of course you are :) Just imagine the sort of stuff that's going to be in the rubbish!
. Report cards that kids didn't want their parents to find
. Shopping lists
. Angry letters that were written and then thrown out as a form of symbolism
. Overdue bills
. Drafts of existing legendary documents (It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times, etc)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Papyrus was valuable at the time. Shopping lists would have been written on pieces of broken ceramics, not on papyrus. And even overdue bills can be instructive. Remember, most of the Minoan Linear B documents are just warehouse records.