Ancient Forgeries & Hobby Lobby | Madeleine Schwartz
In 2012 I enrolled in a master’s program at Oxford to study papyrology. Of the many subfields in classics, papyrology is perhaps the most difficult to understand but also the most bewitching. It is one of the only types of classical scholarship through which new texts can still be found; there is always the promise that the pieces of reedy paper papyrologists conserve and study could contain unknown work. Archaeologists began to look for these texts in the middle of the nineteenth century, after a discovery of carbonized books at the Italian city of Herculaneum a century earlier—mainly works of philosophy—drew public attention to the vast array of ancient literature that might still be brought to light. “What rapture! could ye seize/Some Theban fragment,” Wordsworth wrote in 1819, “or unroll/One precious, tender-hearted scroll/Of pure Simonides.” Egypt promised still greater treasures, since the dry climate that kept mummies intact was also good for preserving papyrus, a fragile material made from the pith of the papyrus plant. In the early nineteenth century, after Egyptian peasants happened upon …
