http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2046517,00.html
The City of the Sharp-nosed Fish: Greek Lives in Roman Egypt by Peter Parsons 320pp, Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Review by Tom Holland: "Peter Parsons is uniquely well qualified to act as a guide to what they found. For more than 50 years he has been working on the treasures exhumed a century ago from Oxyrhynchos: scraps of papyrus, some 500,000 of them, all inscribed with Greek. They date from a period long after the reign of Tutankhamen, when Egypt, having been conquered first by Alexander the Great, and then by Rome, was ruled by men whose culture was proudly classical. The contents of the average municipal tip back then appear to have been a good deal more high-brow than they are today: the Oxyrhynchos elite were endlessly dumping masterpieces of Greek literature, and the fragments of these poems and histories, many of them lost for centuries, are still being painstakingly pieced together by scholars such as Parsons. So too are documents from the earliest days of Christianity: it was at Oxyrhynchos, for instance, that a section of the suppressed gnostic Gospel of Thomas was first unearthed."
The City of the Sharp-nosed Fish: Greek Lives in Roman Egypt by Peter Parsons 320pp, Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Review by Tom Holland: "Peter Parsons is uniquely well qualified to act as a guide to what they found. For more than 50 years he has been working on the treasures exhumed a century ago from Oxyrhynchos: scraps of papyrus, some 500,000 of them, all inscribed with Greek. They date from a period long after the reign of Tutankhamen, when Egypt, having been conquered first by Alexander the Great, and then by Rome, was ruled by men whose culture was proudly classical. The contents of the average municipal tip back then appear to have been a good deal more high-brow than they are today: the Oxyrhynchos elite were endlessly dumping masterpieces of Greek literature, and the fragments of these poems and histories, many of them lost for centuries, are still being painstakingly pieced together by scholars such as Parsons. So too are documents from the earliest days of Christianity: it was at Oxyrhynchos, for instance, that a section of the suppressed gnostic Gospel of Thomas was first unearthed."
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