Oxyrhynchus trash heaps preserved more Greek text than all pre-Christian literary transmission combined
Evidence
This is the largest single archaeological-textual recovery in the history of Greco-Roman classical studies. More text has come out of the Oxyrhynchus trash heaps, cumulatively, than survived in continuous manuscript transmission from the entire pre-Christian Greek-language literary tradition. The Oxyrhynchus papyri include previously unknown plays of Sophocles and Euripides, previously unknown fragments of Sappho’s poetry, previously unknown gospels and apocrypha, substantial material on Hellenistic mathematics and science, and — most relevant for tonight’s episode — thousands of personal letters, school exercises, household documents, and administrative records that give us, for the first time, direct access to the everyday textual culture of a real Greco-Roman provincial town. — , The Rod and the Child, 1530
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to earlier episodes on the Sumerian Schooldays text (Episode 1) and Hebrew rod-verses (Episode 3) — the comparative scale claim makes Oxyrhynchus the outlier.