Field Notes

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Coming into Focus

Infrared Imaging Recovers “Lost” Greco-Roman Texts

In 1896 the world’s largest cache of classical documents was discovered in ancient rubbish mounds in the central Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus (modern el-Bahnasa). (The photo shows the site during excavations conducted around 1903.) Although a number of the 400,000 Greek and Roman manuscript fragments have been published, many were so blackened and worm-eaten that they were completely illegible.

Last spring specialists at Oxford University and Brigham Young University used infrared technology developed from satellite imaging to recover damaged script from some Oxyrhynchus documents. These documents include previously unknown works of Sophocles and Hesiod, as well as early Islamic writings and Christian epistles not included in the New Testament.

Oxyrhynchus became a regional capital after the Greek conquest of Egypt in 332 B.C., and its residents therefore accumulated a lot of paperwork. For more than 1,000 years, Oxyrhynchus’s paper detritus—invoices, administrative and military correspondence, tax records, licenses and even students’ jottings—was carted off to dumps outside town. Luckily for archaeologists, papyrus was expensive and frequently reused. A document containing a simple listing of agricultural purchases on one side might well turn out to have lines from a long-lost play by Euripides on the other.

Scholars predict that the use of multispectral imaging to read the Oxyrhynchus hoard may lead to a 20-percent increase in the number of known Greco-Roman literary works. As University of Michigan classicist Richard Janko told Archaeology Odyssey, “The discovery of a passage from the seventh-century B.C. Greek poet Archilochus alone is very exciting; we previously had perhaps 200 of his lines, and here are 30 more”.

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A Whiff of Antiquity

4,000-Year-Old Perfumery Uncovered in Cyprus

Last February archaeologists excavating a hillside 55 miles southwest of Nicosia, Cyprus, discovered one of the oldest unguent-production centers in the world.

The perfumery at the site of Pyrgos-Mavroraki was part of a large industrial complex dating from 2000 B.C. The center once included a winery, a copper-smelting works, 130-gallon storage jars and an olive press (olive oil was probably used as a solvent in extracting fragrances).

The archaeological team from the Italian Institute of Technologies Applied to Cultural Heritage, headed by Maria Rosaria Belgiorno, also uncovered circular pits used to store aromatic oils, as well as fragments of clay bottles that still contained the oil residue (lower photo).

Scientists have extracted more than a dozen different oils from these pottery sherds. Bronze Age Cypriots relied on local plants—laurel, myrtle, cinnamon, anise and citrus bergamot—to create their unguents, which were likely used in funerary and religious ceremonies.

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Manfred Korfmann, 63, Dies

The distinguished German archaeologist Manfred Osman Korfmann died last August after a long battle with cancer. For the past 17 years, Korfmann co-directed excavations at the mound of Hisarlik in northwestern Turkey, which was identified as Homer’s Troy in the 1870s by Frank Calvert and Heinrich Schliemann.

Born in Cologne in 1942, Korfmann studied at the University of Frankfurt, where he earned his doctorate in 1970. Over the next decade he served as an academic consultant at the German Archaeological Institute and directed four seasons of excavations of an Early Bronze Age fortress at Demircihüyük, in western Turkey. In 1982 he was named director of the Institute of Prehistory at the University of Tübingen, a post he held for the rest of his life.

In 1988 the Turkish government granted Korfmann permission to dig at Hisarlik—the first archaeological work at the site since the University of Cincinnati archaeologist Carl Blegen’s excavations there from 1932 to 1938. During the course of his excavations, Korfmann became convinced that Troy VI—an occupation level dating to the Late Bronze Age (c. 1700–1230 B.C.)—was a prosperous city due to its strategic location on the southwestern end of the Hellespont. The implication was that Troy VI was the city memorialized in Homer’s Iliad, though Korfmann did not like to make this connection explicit.

Korfmann promoted the idea that Hisarlik/Troy was a large and important Late Bronze Age city in a 2001 traveling exhibit called Troy: Dream and Reality, which was viewed by over a million people in Germany. Some scholars then challenged Korfmann’s interpretation of the site, however, claiming that Troy VI was little more than a noble family’s country estate, not the great city described by Homer (for more on this controversy, see “The New Trojan Wars,” Archaeology Odyssey, July/August 2002).

The excavations at Troy will proceed in Korfmann’s absence. As Peter Jablonka, the deputy excavation leader, told Archaeology Odyssey, “Professor Korfmann’s last wish was that we continue to work at Troy in his spirit. Accordingly, the current excavation season at Troy proceeds as planned. We shall then concentrate on the analysis and publication of the results from the large-scale excavations he conducted at Troy since 1988.”

The Turkish city Canakkale, the provincial capital of the Troy region, named Manfred Korfmann an honorary citizen on August 10th, the day before he died.

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YoniToons

Coming into Focus