Play of Euripides on Excavated Papyrus

Imagine if they'd been dug up by artefact hunters and without being transcribed, anlaysed or interpreted sold on eBay to a buyer only interested in having something 'cool' in their ephemeral private collection, that may be saved by the heirs or simply discarded as "grandpa's old junk" (Guillermo Carvajal, 'Previously unknown fragments of two lost tragedies by Euripides, discovered in an Egyptian papyrus' LBV Magazine, August 4, 2024):

Two scholars from the University of Colorado Boulder have unearthed significant fragments from two lost tragedies by the ancient Greek playwright Euripides. This discovery, made after months of painstaking research, is hailed as one of the most substantial findings in over fifty years.

The journey began in November 2022 when Basem Gehad, an archaeologist with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, sent a papyrus to Yvona Trnka-Amrhein, an assistant professor of classics at the University of Colorado Boulder. The papyrus was discovered at the ancient site of Philadelphia in Egypt

The settlement of Gerza in the Fayoum was known as Philadelphia in the Ptolemaic era. It was established in the 3rd century BC as a central settlement in the framework of an agricultural reclamation project implemented by King Ptolemy II (Philadelphia) in the Fayoum region, with the aim of securing food sources for the Egyptian kingdom. An Egyptian archaeological mission began excavation work here in 2016 and revealed archaeological material from the period from the 3rd c. BC until the end of the 3rd century AD

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