While excavating archaeological sites in Egypt, some of the few remaining fragments of Sappho’s poetry we have were discovered as stuffing inside a mummified crocodile. Isn’t that an apt analogy for where all poems come from, arising by chance from an obscure animal darkness?
2 comments:
Is this serious? Gimme a source. Yes. Yes! YES! Tell me where this story is printed! It's too cool!
And Sappho rocks my world, crocs or no.
I hope it's not apocryphal. Now that you've called me on the facts, scrounging around the web, I see some references to literary papyri found inside mummified crocs in dumps uncovered by Grenfell and Hunt in a 1895 archaeological expedition...
http://www.umilta.net/papyrology.html
A NYTimes report of June 1914 says a poem by Sappho was found among the papyri excavated by Grenfell and Hunt.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9502E5DF143AE633A25757C1A9609C946596D6CF
Here's a account of the Oxyrhynchus find...
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2007/04/egypt-greek-papyri-parsons
"By the end of the first season, Grenfell and Hunt had discovered an entire library of lost classics, including a tattered verse by Sappho in which she prays for her brother's safe return - a poem not seen by human eyes since the fall of Rome."
But was the Sappho extracted from a croc? Several reports repeat the story...
http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art809.asp
but no definitive sources for Sappho being found inside a mummified crocodile.
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