Oxford World's Classics For over 100 years, Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. “Sold, but not delivered.”. Wednesday, 23 October 2019. Now, Mike Sampson, a papyrologist at the University of Manitoba, has found evidence, seen by the Guardian, suggesting that the origin-story of the Sappho manuscript reported by Obbink may be a fiction. The market in a hitherto arcane area of collecting sky-rocketed. Go to desktop site. Sampson has analysed the metadata of the PDF, and believes that the Sappho fragment was in fact probably offered for sale by private treaty twice – once in 2013, prior to the public announcement of its existence, and again in 2015. There is a separate section containing Loebs for the texts/authors included in the syllabus. Another lecturer in Greek told me that the alleged crime was, in effect, a deeply disturbing perpetuation of the “profiteering and the pillage” of past centuries – just at the moment when the discipline was trying to reflect on a history of complicity with colonialism. Less orthodox callers, too: among them, antiquities dealers and collectors. He has a reputation for elusiveness. Stāsti par vēsturi. There is no suggestion Carroll was involved in wrongdoing in this regard: the point is that the timeline seems so implausible as to be impossible. It had been bought and paid for by Hobby Lobby, and donated to the museum. Researchers are employed to help; scholars come in and out to study the material. “My wife will laugh and remember the time she would come into the house and smell mummy on the stove,” Carroll told an audience in Mexico, in 2013. Now, in the light of the revelations of the alleged thefts of the Oxyrhynchus papyri, scholars are looking at the Sappho story with new eyes, and asking, with a fresh sense of urgency, whether the manuscript can have been legally obtained.

One papyrologist told me, “I could have spent my career thinking about old chestnuts like the terminal date of Caesar’s command, or whatever. Holmes is trying to improve practices at the Museum of the Bible. That seemingly tiny piece of information would, later, turn out to be a crucial clue in putting together the story of the alleged thefts from the Oxyrhynchus collection. These include ORA (Oxford University Research Archive), OxLIP+ (currently over 800 e-resource databases) and OU E-Journals (over 28,000 e-journals). Even at this point, Mazza told me, the whole idea still seemed crazy – as ridiculous as the plotline of 1960s Italian film Totòtruffa, in which a hustler pretends to sell the Trevi fountain to a tourist. In 2017, for example, a consignment of ancient Iraqi cuneiform tablets they had purchased was found to have been smuggled into the US as “tile samples”. This “industrial cartonnage”, with the Sappho supposedly hidden within it, had been purchased by auction at Christie’s in 2011, as part of a mixed lot of papyrus. One blustery evening towards the end of Michaelmas term, 2011, two visiting Americans climbed Obbink’s staircase – Drs Scott Carroll and Jerry Pattengale. “I started to feel like it was the parousia [Christ’s second coming] – it’s coming soon, but we don’t know when.”.

However, the alleged thief seems to have erred in one crucial respect: they do not seem to have known, or taken into account, that there was back-up information allowing the EES to ascertain what had allegedly been stolen. We take our name and reputation very seriously and would take all necessary steps available to address any situation of inappropriate use.” The auction house says that if there is any official investigation, they will cooperate. There are printed copies of older exam papers in the CLL. The other possible reason – though this is not Sampson’s personal view – would be to mask a fake. Learn more about these useful resources on our COVID-19 page. On 18 December, the 13 were returned, after a delay while it was established that since they were stolen goods, they were exempt from VAT – a coda to the affair that Holmes called “the cherry on the sundae”. Who was the papyrologist?

The series consists of texts without commentaries but with brief apparatus criticus at the foot of each page. In total, the EES has now discovered that 120 fragments have gone missing from the Oxyrhynchus collection over the past 10 years. The collection’s walls are lined with tall, locked cupboards, filled with ranks of boxes.

The Greens, it was becoming apparent to observers, were not doing that.

Ehrman was bursting with questions. There is a collection of articles cited on reading lists. The aim of the series remains that of including the works of all the principal classical authors. At any one time, up to three general editors share the duties of working on the material and assigning it to scholars for study and publication.