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Our wander through wisdom poetry in Greek class has taken us at last to the Derveni Papyrus, which is one of those very recent discoveries (by the standards of classics, anyway); if you go to the Wikipedia article, it will note that the papyrus was discovered in 1962; it then goes on to say:
"The text was not officially published for forty-four years after its discovery (though three partial editions were published). A team of experts was assembled in autumn 2005..."
As I discovered from my prof in Thursday's class, this is eliding a long, fraught, and downright entertaining history, in which scholars around the world were waiting for decades to find out what was on this papyrus, and the people who had the rights to work with it were producing...nothing. Or at least nothing official. Long, long stretches of nothing.
Meanwhile, various other scholars were being allowed little sneak peeks at portions of the papyrus, and were coming out with their translations of those fragments, which were then circulated in the academic community. Unofficially! Because officially only the team in possession of the papyrus was allowed to do anything with it. It got to the point that there were something like two dozen fragments circulating, some of the people who had produced the earlier ones had died waiting for the release of the official transcription, and...well. Nothing.
This is about the point at which someone transcribed the entire fragmentary text over a series of visits, and had it published in a journal. The journal, knowing that it didn't have rights to publish this, put it on un-numbered pages that were attached to the end of the journal, and not officially part of the, well, official journal publication. The team that had the papyrus threw a fit; people might have been banned from Greece and/or conferences, I forget the details; All Classics Academia Was Plunged Into War; and eventually, that several decades after the original discovery, an official version was published.
I don't find the fragments particularly interesting, I must confess. I have never liked working with fragmentary text to start with, and I dislike having to fight my way through weird forms of vocabulary that gives me enough headaches when it's in the 'standard' Attic forms. But the history of the papyrus? Golden.
"The text was not officially published for forty-four years after its discovery (though three partial editions were published). A team of experts was assembled in autumn 2005..."
As I discovered from my prof in Thursday's class, this is eliding a long, fraught, and downright entertaining history, in which scholars around the world were waiting for decades to find out what was on this papyrus, and the people who had the rights to work with it were producing...nothing. Or at least nothing official. Long, long stretches of nothing.
Meanwhile, various other scholars were being allowed little sneak peeks at portions of the papyrus, and were coming out with their translations of those fragments, which were then circulated in the academic community. Unofficially! Because officially only the team in possession of the papyrus was allowed to do anything with it. It got to the point that there were something like two dozen fragments circulating, some of the people who had produced the earlier ones had died waiting for the release of the official transcription, and...well. Nothing.
This is about the point at which someone transcribed the entire fragmentary text over a series of visits, and had it published in a journal. The journal, knowing that it didn't have rights to publish this, put it on un-numbered pages that were attached to the end of the journal, and not officially part of the, well, official journal publication. The team that had the papyrus threw a fit; people might have been banned from Greece and/or conferences, I forget the details; All Classics Academia Was Plunged Into War; and eventually, that several decades after the original discovery, an official version was published.
I don't find the fragments particularly interesting, I must confess. I have never liked working with fragmentary text to start with, and I dislike having to fight my way through weird forms of vocabulary that gives me enough headaches when it's in the 'standard' Attic forms. But the history of the papyrus? Golden.