Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
...is no longer in service. Please hang up, check your Number of the Beast, and try again.
Oxyrhynchus, 100 miles (160 kilometers) southwest of modern-day Cairo, rose to prominence under Egypt's Greek and Roman rulers. The town's papyrus-rich garbage heaps were excavated in the late 1890s by two Oxford University fellows, B.P. Grenfell and A.S. Hunt. Researchers have been painstakingly piecing together the Oxyrhynchus papyri fragments ever since.
So far 65 volumes of transcripts and translations have been published by the London-based Egypt Exploration Society, which owns the collection. The latest volume includes details of fragments showing third- and fourth-century versions of the Book of Revelations. Intriguingly, the number assigned to "the Beast" of Revelations isn't the usual 666, but 616.
Credit to Fantastic Planet for the catch. They've just figured out how to read the long-faded writing on these using a technique called multi-spectral imaging, and there is a whopping lot of stuff to examine, including lost works by Sophocles, Euripedes, and Hesiod.
Oxyrhynchus, situated on a tributary of the Nile 100 miles south of Cairo, was a prosperous regional capital and the third city of Egypt, with 35,000 people. It was populated mainly by Greek immigrants, who left behind tons of papyri upon which slaves trained in Greek had documented the community's arts and goings-on.
Oxford's researchers started salvaging 100,000 fragments of papyri from the town's rubbish dump in 1897 and shipped some 800 containers back to Britain. About 2,000 pieces of the papyri have been published and mounted in glass, but the rest has remained in boxes. According to the current research team, "the mass of unedited material represents the random waste-paper of seven centuries of Greco-Egyptian life."
Some 10 percent of it is literary, the fragmentary remains of ancient books, with the rest documents of public and private life, such as census returns, tax assessments, court records, wills, horoscopes and private letters.
Fascinating. The project's website is here.
Update: In the comments, JPW links to an article by somebody working on the texts in question who says that the hype around this is mostly, well, hype.
TrackBack616 is the area code of Grand Rapids, Michigan, birthplace of Gerald Ford.
Dude, we missed the Rapture. And now we know what drove Betty to the bottle.
Posted by: Kevin Hayden at April 27, 2005 08:04 AMI've heard the 616 in connection with the number of the beast before, but I can't remember where. I can't even remember if it was in my fundamentalist Baptist days or fascination with Nag Hammadi days.
Posted by: John Johnson at April 27, 2005 08:07 AMYou can discover more about a group of people by looking at their garbage than by just about any other method.
Posted by: froz gobo at April 27, 2005 08:59 AMThere's hope of finding published works of Aristotle... in someone's garbage.
Posted by: lenhart at April 27, 2005 11:11 AM"There's hope of finding published works of Aristotle." That's nice, but....
"sex manuals" - is this a euphemism for PORN!
Papyri porn!
Awesome!
Posted by: Joel at April 27, 2005 12:00 PMFinding out 666 is really 616 sounds like some pretty big news to me.
Posted by: Tripp at April 27, 2005 01:36 PMhttp://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/archimedes/palimpsest.html
Last season, Nova ran an episode showing how multi-spectral imaging was being used to recover some of Archimedes' original work.
The site above has some nice Flash doo-dads that illustrate how multi-spectral imaging works.
Posted by: Heath at April 27, 2005 11:36 PMMy inaugural address at the Great White Throne Judgment of the Dead, after I have raptured out billions!
At: http://www.angelfire.com/crazy/spaceman/
eschatology,End Times,second coming,rapture,secret rapture,Second Resurrection,Great White Throne Judgment of the Dead,
End of Days,Day of the Lord,Endtime,Judgment Day
Look at the Following Positive Natural Integers
1,2,3,5,7,11,13,17,19,23,29,31,37,41,43,47,
7*7=49,3*17=51,53,3*19=57,59,61,67,71,73,79,
3*3*3*3=81,83,3*29=87,89,7*13=91,97,101,103,107,
109,3*37=111,113,2*2*3*13=117,7*17=119
and so the Squere Root of 121=11*11
that is Eleven(11)
To Prove the Numbers upp to 121
If the are Prime Factors or Not
it is only neccessary to Prove
with the Prime Factors
2,3,5 and 7
In Reality it is only neccessary to Prove
The Gods Holy Numbers
Three(3) and Seven(7)
As can be read in Moses Writtings
In Genesis 1600 B.C.
What is Called The Number of The Beast
Is The Number Just Below Seven(7)
The Six(6) on the Other Hand is
The Number Just Above Seven(7)
The Eight(8) The King of the Numbers
Compare: Henry the Eight(8) of England
Compare also 1997 and 1789 The Year of The
French Revolution there are two Prime Factors
there 89 and 97
Sincerely
Urban Salomon Avierfjard
Gr墯,Visby,Gotland,The Baltic Sea,
Sweden