The Oxyrhynchus Papyri and other adventures

Having completed the majority of my UK bucket list (which included eating and drinking at an english pub and a visit to the ashmolean museum and seeing *pause for fangirling* a MONTEFORTINO HELMET!!@!!@!@*@*&#Y@), I began what I set out to do here at Oxford: working with ancient papyri.

On Monday, we were instructed to go to a cylindrical library next to the Ashmolean museum, wherein are housed the Oxyrhynchus papyri. After a rather embarrassing hour's trek, myself and my walking companion David found the library. Upon arrival, we were instructed to put our bags into lockers and to file silently into the library. When we got into the stairwell, we were instructed to keep completely silent as we walked through the rest of the library. We were taken upstairs to a laboratory filled with cabinets, many of which were filled with ancient papyri found in a trash heap in Egypt. Much of the collection (found between the 1890's and 1909) was still in its original boxes wrapped in the Oxford news paper. Apparently the acid was not harming the papyrus. The important point here is that only about 10% of the massive collection has been read and published. Why is that a good thing for someone like me, you ask? It means that there is still stuff about ancient history that we don't know, which means there is still something to write a PhD on.

At any rate, some important highlights of the collection were:
- A writing sample of a Roman scribe practicing his hand at some lines from the Aeneid
- A personal letter with still visible doodles
- An extrabiblical account of Jesus healing the Gerasine Demoniac from a very early period
-A hieroglyphic text which i could not read
So needless to say, it is quite good to see that not only the scientists get to make ground breaking discoveries.

Below are some pictures from the Ashmolean musuem. The mask of Agamemnon along with the artifacts from Minoan Crete (the chair and octopus pottery) are casts, but as far as I know the rest is legit.