Ancient public library discovered in Germany

Re:Ancient public library discovered in Germany by olavk on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @02:39AM (#17660187)

An Egyptologist told me there are enough unstudied papyri in archives to keep all researchers occupied for the next 100 years. Basically there is no need to dig anymore - the limiting factor is not finding the scrolls, it is studying them to figure out if they contain anything interesting.

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Re:Ancient public library discovered in Germany by arketyp on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @03:31AM (#17660338)

Surely there's some order in this "reading list" where new discoveries can take priority based on circumstantial factors of the digging site alone.

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Re:Ancient public library discovered in Germany by olavk on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @05:52AM (#17661045)

To some extent, but take a find like the Oxyrhynchus Papyri https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyrhynchus_Papyri - it is basically a giant trash heap of unorganized papyrus fragments. It was discovered in 1896 and it still being cataloged! Most of it is uninteresting, but some amazing finds like a previously unknown play by Sophocles.

To quote Wikipedia: Since 1898 academics have puzzled together and transcribed over 5000 documents from what were originally hundreds of boxes of papyrus fragments the size of large cornflakes. This is thought to represent only 1 to 2 percent of what is estimated to be at least half a million papyri still remaining to be conserved, transcribed, deciphered and catalogued.

And that is just one find.

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Re:Ancient public library discovered in Germany by singularity2001 on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @02:53AM (#17660228)

He can contact me if he is interested in Hieratic OCR.

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