Uncovered Euripides fragments are ‘kind of a big deal’
After months of intense scrutiny, two University of Colorado Boulder scholars have deciphered and interpreted what they believe to be the most significant new fragments of works by classical Greek tragedian Euripides in more than half a century.
In November 2022, Basem Gehad, an archaeologist with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, sent a papyrus unearthed at the ancient site of Philadelphia in Egypt to Yvona Trnka-Amrhein, assistant professor of classics. The two scholars have also recently discovered the upper half of a colossal statue of the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II in their joint excavation project at Hermopolis Magna.
She began to pore over the high-resolution photo of the papyrus (Egyptian law prohibits physically removing any artifact from the country), scrutinizing its 98 lines.
CU Boulder classicists Yvona Trnka-Amrhein (left) and John Gibert (right) spent months studying a small square of papyrus and became confident it contains previously unknown material from two fragmentary Euripides plays, Polyidus and Ino.
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