“For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure — a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation.” The only problem: the collection is made up of papyrus fragments that are decayed, fragile, and unreadable—until four days ago. According to a report in The Independent by David Keys and Nicholas Pyke, scientists have discovered how to use new technology to read the collection, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri and made up of “400,000 fragments, stored in 800 boxes at Oxford’s Sackler Library.” The “biggest hoard of classical manuscripts in the world” was discovered 100 years ago “in an ancient rubbish dump in central Egypt.” According to the report, “in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard . . . . In the past four days alone, Oxford’s classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia.”

• MORE: “What is multi-spectral imaging?” A report at Slate by Daniel Engber explains. “It’s a technique that was developed in the early 1990s to decode parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls.”