Ancient Greeks’ “Facebook”

Garbage of the ancient city in upper Egypt, Oxyrhynchus, was proved to be a buried treasure! Researchers are now able to reveal unknown aspects of ancient culture and life such as Plato’s hidden “music code” and Sappho poems. In Oxyrhynchus a treasure literary emerged from the garbage.  After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the British occupied Egypt in1882. 14 years later, in 1896 two researchers coming from Oxford University, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt began excavations in the region. “It was sufficient just to pick up some soil with our boots to reveal another layer of papyri” stated Grenfell.
What has happened?
The post-Roman inhabitants of Oxyrhynchus have thrown the records of the old providential capital in the dump of the town, to have more space for constructions.
Over there, next to the channel which has dried up, the papyri were buried, remaining safe from moisture. It is estimated that the “stock of Oxyrhynchus” is equivalent to 70% of the world’s ever found papyri. Despite the looters raids, a unique treasure of thousands of pages was found in the region, including lost works of Euclid, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Pindar, Sappho and Alcaeus, Aristophanes, Demosthenes, Apollonius of Rhodes, of Simonides of Menander and Nikarchou. What they have also been able to find, was some valuable early Christian texts, such as informal Gospels, Epistles of John and the Apocalypse of Baruch. In 2005 there has been a great deal of publicity surrounding the Oxyrhynchus papyri collection in Oxford , mainly, due to the discovery of the first poetry written passages, which were 30 lines of poetry by Archilochus, the successor of Homer in the 7th century BC .