As I previously discussed in this post I wrote back in 2021, the vast majority of ancient Greek drama has not survived to the present day. Of the hundreds of Greek tragic playwrights who flourished in antiquity, only three have any plays that have survived to the present day complete under their own names: Aischylos, Sophokles, and Euripides. At least ninety-five plays attributed to Euripides circulated in antiquity. Of these, only nineteen have survived to the present day complete and only eighteen of them are actually his work. (One of the surviving plays attributed to him, Rhesos, is generally agreed by modern scholars to be the work of a different playwright wrongly attributed to Euripides.)
Many of Euripides’s lost plays, however, are not totally lost; fragments of them survive. Some of these fragments are preserved through quotation by later ancient writers in surviving works, while others survive on papyri that have been discovered in Egypt over the past roughly century and a half. Some of these fragments are as long as whole scenes, while others are as short as a single word. A new expansion to Euripides’s surviving corpus, however, has just arrived. On August 1st, 2024, two classics professors at the University of Colorado Boulder announced that they have identified substantial previously unknown sections from two of his lost tragedies on a papyrus recently discovered in Egypt. This is a positively electrifying discovery for the field of classics.
How these fragments were discovered and identified
In 2022, the archaeologist Basem Gehad, who works for the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, found a papyrus at the site of Philadelphia in Egypt bearing ninety-eight lines of Greek text. He sent a photo of this papyrus to Yvona Trnka-Amrhein, an assistant professor in the classics department at the University of Colorado Boulder who specializes in literary papyrology.
On August 1st, 2024, Trnka-Amrhein and her colleague John Gilbert, who is also a classics professor at CU Boulder and specializes in Greek tragic fragments, announced that they have identified the text on the papyrus as excerpts from two tragedies by Euripides: Polyidos and Ino, both of which survive only in fragments. According to Trnka-Amrhein and Gilbert, twenty-two of the lines found on the papyrus were previously known through other sources, but the remaining seventy-six lines were previously completely unknown.
Why this discovery is so exciting
This is a thrilling discovery for several reasons. First, the new fragments are the longest ones of Euripides discovered in half a century. Any newly discovered fragments of his work of this length would be tremendously exciting, regardless of their contents. The fact that these fragments have been discovered so recently also suggests that there may still be more long previously unknown fragments out there.
The content of the newly discovered fragments, however, makes them especially exciting. The Polyidos is Euripides’s adaptation of a truly bizarre myth in which Glaukos, the son of King Minos and Queen Pasiphaë of Krete, drowns in a vat of honey and the king and queen order the seer Polyidos of Corinth to resurrect their son from the dead. Aischylos, Sophokles, and Euripides all wrote tragedies based on this myth, but none of them have survived complete. According to Trnka-Amrhein, the newly discovered papyrus bears a partial scene from Euripides’s adaptation “in which Minos and Polyidus debate the morality of resurrecting the dead.”
Meanwhile, the Ino was one of Euripides’s best-known plays in antiquity and its story bears parallels to two of his plays that are most widely studied and performed today: Medeia (Medea) and the Bakkhai (Bacchae). The discovery of a substantial new fragment of this play may therefore not only shed light on the lost Ino itself, but also potentially provide new context for two of Euripides’s most canonical complete plays.
For more information, readers can read this article published on the University of Colorado Boulder website.
That’s so cool that there are still works to discover! Where in Philadelphia, Egypt were the papyrus hidden?
Unfortunately, the article on the University of Colorado Boulder website does not precisely specify where the papyrus was found, so I cannot say for certain. My guess is that it was most likely either in a rubbish dump or a tomb, which are the two most likely places to find papyri. That, however, is merely an informed guess and it may be totally wrong.
I’m betting garbage dump.
The fact that so many ancient literary works have been lost forever (fragments like this one are a lucky find), and that which ones survived is largely (but not entirely) dependent on what people decided to preserve, makes me wonder how much of our current literature will still exist millennia from now.
Probably very little. In fact, it is likely that, two thousand years from now, an even smaller fraction of our current written material will survive than has survived from classical antiquity due to the fact that digital memory has a far shorter life expectancy than writing on clay, papyrus, stone, or parchment, especially since newer technologies are constantly superseding older ones and the ability to access material saved on outdated devices is quickly lost after those devices fall out of use. If you want information to survive for two thousand years or more, don’t put it online or save it on a computer; instead, write it in clay, fire it, and bury it in the desert somewhere. Scholars are already calling the age we currently live in a “digital dark age.”
Better start getting those clay tablets ready! And also we may have to make choices in which ones to preserve.
I dunno about that; Preservation techniques are better now than ever. Plus, who can actually carve on tablets?
?
You “carve” on clay. Then bake in the sun; charcoal not invented until the Middle Ages.
Drowning in a vat of honey? Wow, that’s every bit as weird as drowning in a butt of Malmsey!
Thanks for this post! It is nice that you keep your readers updated on interesting news in this field (I’d not heard of it myself).
Yep! I wanted to make a post about it because this is pretty big news for the field, but it isn’t likely to be reported by major news outlets, who don’t typically get excited about new ancient text discoveries that don’t involve use of advanced technology and don’t directly pertain to the Bible. I’m glad that I was able to help spread the word!
I am constantly pointing out to people who claim “science cannot explain” that someone has to try is a precondition. Science certainly doesn’t explain things it has never tried to explain.
Similarly in classics, there are mountains of documents unexplored, even in the Vatican Archives. What if there were something on the order of the 1960 Geophysical Year effort applied to ancient documents? Surely there are billionaires out there who could finance such a thing. It would take a great organizing effort, but it would really stir the pot historically.
The problem is that, while there are still at least half a million papyri that were discovered in Grenfell and Hunt’s excavations at Oxyrhynchos over a century ago still sitting in boxes unsorted and unpublished and potentially millions more papyri still waiting to be discovered, there are not nearly enough scholars or enough funding to sort through them, piece the fragments together, decipher their texts, and publish them all. In fact, the number of scholars and the amount of funding for the field is only declining, not because there aren’t enough people who want to study this stuff, but because, for the most part, college and university administrators and society at large don’t value the study of antiquity.
Colleges and universities are constantly cutting positions for scholars who specialize in the ancient world. When old tenured professors retire, universities frequently don’t hire new tenure-track faculty to replace them. Many universities are now getting rid of their classics and history programs entirely and the number of universities who are doing this is only likely to grow over the next ten years. There is a realistic possibility that, as little as ten years from now, the professional academic study of the ancient world may not exist at all outside a small handful of elite universities.
Even fewer of the universities that do still have classics departments that teach classics courses are able to offer advanced Ancient Greek language courses, since many universities won’t allow those courses to be offered due to the low enrollment they typically receive. The lack of advanced Greek courses at most universities, however, is making it more and more difficult for young people who are interested in the field to develop the language abilities they need to go into it professionally.
Even so, the number of brilliant, hand-working scholars with PhDs in classics and ancient history is still vastly greater than the number of positions for them to fill and, unfortunately, the number of positions is only shrinking. Young, brilliant, hard-working scholars are being pushed out of the field simply due to the lack of secure employment in it. The field is literally dying even though an immense amount of work remains to be done, an immense amount of material remains unstudied, and an abundance of people want to study that material, simply because our broken capitalist society doesn’t regard this study as financially profitable and therefore doesn’t value it.
The Vesuvius Challenge has received an enormous amount of mainstream attention and I think that it’s awesome that, if they do manage to make the Herculaneum Papyri readable without opening them, we may be able to get back tons of previously lost classical texts. Unfortunately, that project is throwing around enormous amounts of money, very little of it is actually going to actual papyrologists, classicists, or ancient historians, the vast majority of the money is going to teams of computer scientists, and the project is doing nothing to alleviate the greatest problem facing the field, which is that socioeconomic forces are slowly killing it. We may end up in a future in which there are thousands of new, readable ancient Greek texts available and almost no professional scholars outside of a tiny handful of elite universities who can actually read them and publish about them.
“science cannot explain” XX
To paraphrase a couple of people, if science could explain everything we could stop stop doing science.
Thank you!!
You’re welcome!
All of the above, especially the “thank you.”
That’s great!
Now time to find the rest of them.
Spencer, you are a super nova. Thanks!
Apart from the Vesuvius Challenge, do you know any organizations or movements that we can support – especially ones that allocate more resources to actual papyrologists, classicists, linguists, and historians?