Appetitive: Paleography is Sexy Again

"Paleography is sexy again," is one of my favorite of the strange statements by Messalla, my thesis adviser. It came up in a conversation about the works of Bacchylides [1]. But it seems that his assessment, however amusingly worded, is true. In the digital age, archives come up all the time and more and more work is digitized to bring it to a wider audience. AWOL catalogues a number of these digital resources.

One of the digital resouces (still in progress) that Propertius II brought to my attention is the Homer Multitext. The purpose of the Homer Multitext is to compile a digital archive of Homer in which scholars can easily compare and cross-reference materials. A partial facsimile prototype of some of the manuscripts is being released by the project, as they explain in a recent blogpost. The original texts seem amazing and the story of the students who worked on them is worth a read.

Endnotes

1. Bacchylides' works were lost until in 1896 they were discovered in a ransacked tomb in Egypt (or possibly as Messalla originally told us in a trashpit). The Wikipedia article makes the archaeologist sounds a bit like Indiana Jones.