Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Mysteries of Ancient Egyptian Papyri Revealed

Thanks very much to Chris Townsend for this article from 14th February, which I missed:
"Three BYU professors have uncovered mysteries in ancient Egyptian writings aided by new technology that allows people to see inscriptions invisible to the naked eye.
The professors Roger Macfarlane, Stephen Bay and Thomas Wayment, have been working on deciphering these writings on papyrus found in an Egyptian dump where an ancient city known as Oxyrhynchus previously existed. The papyri are now housed at the University of Oxford in England and studied by various scholars around the globe.
The technology developed by BYU called multispectral imaging, can penetrate through dirt, stains and other material on the papyri, making it possible to expose obscured lettering. . . . Multispectral imaging uses filters from ultraviolet to infrared waves of light to see through the dirt and stains on the papyri surface. These filters reveal what was written on the papyri over 2,000 years ago. BYU scholars have found original texts from the Bible and even new apocrypha using this technology."

See the above page for the full story

For other posts on this blog about the Oxyrhynchus papyri see:

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