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Well, sort of. We have more papyri preserved than we have people able to read them so a good chunk, if not most of them, have not been read yet. A good deal of
by samastur 10y ago
Well, sort of. We have more papyri preserved than we have people able to read them so a good chunk, if not most of them, have not been read yet.
A good deal of those that also contain mundane things like shopping lists so it is unlikely they were preserved because of deliberate long term effort.
Regretfully I don't have sources for this other than talking to a friend years ago who was in fact one of those people studying them.
- creshal 10y agoIIRC that's more a phenomenon with clay tablets than papyri – and it's an anomaly because of a rather unique combination of extremely sturdy media (clay tablets especially) and extremely well-preserving environmental conditions (dry deserts). And without the Rosetta stone, they'd be incomprehensible still. Preserving texts and preserving knowledge of a language are two separate problems.