Skip ahead a few minutes, and you can hear an Oxford scholar talking about a hundred-year old find of trash that includes, among other things, lost sayings attributed to Jesus in the early period.
In a hundred years of work, they've gotten through a very small percentage of the trash. Old copies of the Iliad, tempting fragments...
The author's top three finds:
#3: A copy of the Book of Revelations' passage with the Number of the Beast, the earliest known copy we have... which gives a different number.
#2: A non-Homeric version of the story of the Iliad in which the Greeks lose the Trojan war.
#1: Turns out one document that they found in the trash mounds over, and over, and over, and over... well, let's call it a "romance novel."
Paper (papyrus) was very valuable, and a scribes time even more so, in the ancient world. If this is indeed a trash pile, how do we know that the piece with the number of the beast with a different number isn't there because it is a mistake? It is, after all, usually why we put things like that in the trash.
ReplyDeleteNaah. The stuff was disposable then, too.
ReplyDeleteAt Vindolanda in the UK, the Romans tossed out all sorts of records and letters that ended up in a midden pile and managed not to decay.
Duty rosters, soldiers complaining about being out of beer, birthday invitations. All sorts of stuff: http://vindolanda.csad.ox.ac.uk/
We've thrown out a ton of stuff. Only some of it was was worth keeping. A smaller part, because it was worth keeping.
ReplyDeleteBut not none of it. Aye?