For the past 230 years or so, the story that was sculpted into the frieze of the Parthenon, the most influential building in the western world, has seemed fairly straight-forward, depicting a civic parade that honored — as did the Parthenon itself — the Greek goddess Athena. But a shocking discovery involving mummies has called this meaning into question, archaeologist and NYU professor Joan Breton Connelly argues in her new book “The Parthenon Enigma” (Knopf). From what Connelly calls “a great detective story,” we’ve learned that the frieze tells a far more tragic tale. In ancient Egypt, while the King Tuts of the world were buried in gold sarcophagi when they died, mere mortals were mummified with cheaper materials — recycled papyrus that held early drafts of written works, including transcribed texts from ancient Greece. When a Greek scholar examined scraps from one of these mummies, he made an astounding discovery — about 250 lines of a lost play, “Erechtheus,” by the great Greek playwright Euripides. “These coffins end up being our best source of lost Greek texts,” says Connelly, who notes that while the sarcophagus containing the play was excavated in 1901, the technology to remove the papyrus without destroying it did not exist until the 1960s. “Nobody knew how to separate these little papier-mâché strips without damaging the writing on them until then,” she says, “when someone devised a method by which they steamed the mummy case in a dilute solution of hydrochloric acid and glycerin and give it a steam bath so they could pull off these layers.” Modal Trigger Papyrus fragments like this one found on a mummy helped crack the story behind the Parthenon. The play tells the tale of an early king of Athens, and how, “when the first Barbarian invasion was surrounding the city, he was told by the Delphic oracle to sacrifice his youngest daughter” in order to win the battle. Read more... nypost/2014/01/26/the-secret-history-of-the-parthenon/
Posted on: Sun, 26 Jan 2014 19:53:59 +0000
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