Guest Author - Caron Andregg

(The following article was written by BellaOnline's Poetry Editor Caron Andregg.)

Literary writers and poets have long looked to history for inspiration. Consider almost any epic poem. The Iliad, Homer’s amalgam of history, legend, myth and invention surrounding the Trojan War, remains a vibrant literary treasure more than 3000 years after its creation.

Occasionally, history - - or the pursuit of historical knowledge - - returns the favor. Over the last century, archeological discoveries in Egypt and the Middle East have unearthed not only facts about ancient life, but also hundreds of pieces of previously lost literature.

The works have been discovered on thousands of fragments of papyrus scrolls found inside mummies and other protected places, preserved by earth and dry desert heat for thousands of years. Originally used as books, personal letters, and business records, at some point the papyri were ‘recycled’ as cavity stuffing material to help mummies maintain their shape. In at least one case, the papyri were found in a huge mound identified as an ancient village dump.

At least one notable cache came from the body cavity of a mummified crocodile. In her article “In The mouth of the Crocodile,” (Humanities, September/October 2000), Paulette Campbell quotes Anthony Bliss, Curator of the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, describing the find. "’He pulled it out of the sand… He chucked it, just heaved it out of the way. It must have hit a rock or something because it broke open and then it was discovered that the crocodile was stuffed with papyri.’"

These papyrus fragments have added to our knowledge of the work of playwrights such as Euripides, Sophocles and Menander and poets such as Hesiod and Archilochus. For no other poet, however, have these discoveries made more of an impact than for the Greek lyric poet Sappho.

Sappho was the daughter of a politically influential family on the Greek island of Lesbos, located near what is now the northwest coast of modern Turkey. Lesbos was peculiar among Greek city states. Unlike in most other Greek kingdoms where women were almost completely segregated from political and social influence, Lesbos seemed to have maintained a culture in which Sappho could develop and demonstrate her literary talents.

There is evidence that she was an influential figure in the social fabric of Mytilene, the most influential city on the island. She wrote verses for both public and private purposes. The public verses were probably recited in religious rituals, and several seem to have been performed as part of marriage ceremonies.

The private poems dealt mostly with love. The orientation of her affection as represented in these love poems - - many of the most passionate were undoubtedly directed toward other women - - may have figured in the almost complete obliteration of her works hundreds of years later.

In the 3rd century BC, Sappho’s collected works were widely read and distributed. According to Jim Powell, author of Sappho: A Garland, “More than three centuries after her death, …Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus of Samothrace collected and edited her poems into nine books arranged according to meter.”

Two centuries later, their texts were so influential that Roman poets Catullus and Horace had either translated her poems into Latin or incorporated several of her themes and techniques into their own odes. Ovid would do the same in his later love poetry.

The popularity of her work continued throughout the Western world until the end of the fourth century. In 380 AD, Pope Gregory Nazianzen issued an edict to Christians the world over to burn Sappho’s books wherever they found them. It is unclear exactly what in Sappho’s subject matter the church deemed sacrilegious, but scholars suggest that the paganism of her ritual texts to Hera, Aphrodite and other gods and goddesses may have been a greater factor than her possible homosexuality.

Another papal edict, this time issued by Pope Gregory VII in 1073, also called for people of Christian faith to burn her works.

By the middle of the last millennium, all but one complete poem of Sappho’s collected works had been lost. “Artfully Adorned Aphrodite” was quoted in its entirety by the critic Dionysis of Helicarnasus. Isolated fragments of her poems could be found in the works of other classical critics, but no other complete or near-complete poems survived.

Until that crocodile snapped in two. Powell notes, “Since the 1890’s, our knowledge of Sappho has been greatly augmented by the discovery of around a hundred more fragments of papyri (one on a potshard) unearthed by archeologists from the sand of Egypt.

A new technological development is now unlocking the secrets of hundreds more papyrus fragments. Multispectral imaging is dramatically changing the pace that papyrologists can recover badly damaged and faded information from papyrus fragments without damaging the material itself. Experts are combing two collections in particular: a trove of over 400,000 papyrus fragments recovered from a garbage dump in Oxyrhynchus, a former provincial capital of central Egypt, and another massive collection from the library at Herculaneum in Italy. The library was buried almost intact, simultaneously roasted and preserved by the super-heated plasma from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

Multispectral imaging of these and other samples has already yielded previously unknown complete plays by Euripides and Sophocles, along with hundreds more lines from Sappho. The sheer volume of material yet to be analyzed suggests that these are just the first of many more literary rediscoveries.


Caron Andregg is the host of BellaOnline’s Poetry channel. Read more at http://www.bellaonline.com/site/poetry


References:
“In the Mouth of the Crocodile”

“Imaging Technology Makes Ancient Text Readable” The Washington Post, Guy Gugliotta, Washington Post Staff Writer, Monday, May 30, 2005; Page A08

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Books by Linda Sue Grimes:
Jiggery-Jee's Eden Valley Stories
Singing in the Silence: Poems of Faith
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