Robert Cioffi · Euripides Unbound
I f you want to get to know someone, especially if you’re an ancient historian, you should go through their rubbish. At the end of the 19th century, two Oxford academics, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, set off for the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus in search of Greek texts written on papyrus. Over six seasons, assisted by scores of local workmen, they excavated thousands of papyri from the city’s rubbish mounds and transported them to Oxford, where the collection still resides. They uncovered enough material to occupy generations of scholars. Alongside works such as Sophocles’ Trackers and the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, a sensation in the early years of the collection, Oxyrhynchus has yielded a student’s whiny letter to his father, legal petitions alleging everything from high crimes to petty acts of violence and endless accounts and receipts. Papyri have played a decisive role in rewriting the history of the ancient Mediterranean.
But sometimes it’s not enough to root around in the bin; you have to look in the cemetery. In November 2022, the archaeologist Heba Adly uncovered a clump of papyri while excavating a shallow grave in the tombs at the ancient city of Philadelphia in the Faiyum Oasis, two hours’ drive south of Cairo. She didn’t need to unfold it to know it could be significant. Philadelphia, founded in the early third century bce by Ptolemy II, had already yielded another remarkable cache of papyri: Zenon’s archive, which consists of two thousand documents that attest in extraordinary detail to the finances and logistics of a large estate between 261 and 229 BCE . The cemetery sits to the east of the city in a wadi, a desert valley where the sand forms eddies and currents, a river in negative. Adly’s team, led by Basem Gehad, has been studying the necropolis for the past decade. Their research has revealed new information about the way burial practices changed over time, as Egypt underwent a series of transitions from the rule of the pharaohs to that of the Macedonian Greek successors of Alexander the Great and, eventually, the Romans. Now they can add to that list of finds a signal contribution to the study of Greek tragedy. One of the papyri excavated by Adly contains 97 lines of two plays by Euripides – Ino and Polyidus – that were known to us only through scattered quotations and summaries of their plots. In terms of number of lines alone, this is the most substantial discovery of Euripides in half a century.
