Peristent Words

As the luddite that I am, I would like to use this post to talk again about just how durable written text is.  Just look at the Oxyrhynchus collection.  It is a group of papyri scrolls and fragments that was discovered in Egypt around the turn of the century.  Some of the fragments are as old as the 1st century A.D.  That's pieces of paper which are still legible after two thousand years.  A large amount of these fragments are housed at Oxford, and here is a link to their website: http://www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk/POxy/

Considering all these papyri were found in the ancient equivalent of  a landfill, there have been some major finds including a new gospel, a play by Euripides, and several letters written by the Stoic philosopher Epictetus.  They still haven't gone through all of the fragments yet, and they found the site over a hundred years ago.  In fact, they are trying to crowd source the effort.  In the Ancient Lives project, they have digitized the fragments, making them available on line, and encouraging people to work on them on their own.  In one of my Greek classes in undergrad, we had to work on a fragment for an assignment.  Here is a link to the Ancient Lives project and a video with a brief description of the project: http://www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk/Ancient_Lives/

Prof. Galey brought up a good point in the post that contained this prompt.  Even though these papyri have survived two thousand years does not mean that they can be read.  While as individuals we may not have retained the ability to read ancient Greek or Latin, as a species we have.  There are a whole host of professionals out there capable of reading these languages, and even a fair sized amateur community.  I highly doubt that titles like Hobbitus Ille or Harrius Potterus et Philosophi Lapis were published solely for classics professors.  Compare this to Caleb's post about digital preservation.  Sure now we might be able to find or salvage a computer old enough to read floppy disks, but in a couple hundred year?  Would we even be able to reverse engineer something to read a floppy disk?  On the other hand, we have a whole professions dedicated to ensuring that we do not lose the ability to read languages both ancient and modern.