This story is a collaboration with Biography.com.
When you’re a mega-fan of a particular artist, waiting for their next release can be a grueling experience. Die-hard Rihanna fans have been holding out since 2016 for a follow-up to her last album, Anti. Fans of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire book series (the basis for Game of Thrones), meanwhile, have been biding their time for The Winds of Winter since 2011.
But fans of one famous playwright have been waiting more than a millennium for his latest works—and they’re finally here.
As reported in La Brujula Verde magazine, two scholars from the University of Colorado Boulder recently made a remarkable discovery in the field, not just of Ancient Greek studies, but of the entirety of the humanities: fragments from two plays long considered lost, penned by one of the ancient world’s most celebrated dramatists, Euripides.
Euripides is one of the three most celebrated tragedians of Ancient Greece, alongside Aeschylus, author of the influential revenge trilogy Oresteia, and Sophocles, best known for the foundational drama of fate, Oedipus Rex. Unlike many of the tragedians of ancient times, these three authors had complete scripts that survived antiquity and exist for people to read and perform in the modern day.
Of those three, it’s Euripides who has the most surviving full-length scripts with 19 (though one, Rhesus, has disputed authorship). Among those fully extant titles are the landmark female-led plays Medea, Electra, and the Homeric satyr play Cyclops, the only play of its kind to still exist.
Even more of Euripides’ plays exist today only in fragments, leaving scholars to speculate what fills in the gaps. And thanks to this recent discovery, future academics will have to do a little less guessing.
Back in November 2022, Yvona Trnka-Amrhein, an assistant professor of classics at the University of Colorado Boulder, was sent a set of high-resolution photos of a papyrus. The photos were sent by Basem Gehad, an archaeologist with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities and captured a 98-line, 10.5 square inch papyrus that had recently been discovered in the ancient site of Philadelphia in Egypt.
Trnka-Amrhein had to rely on photos, rather than the papyrus itself, as Egyptian law forbid the removal of any artifacts out of the country. But those photos were enough to indicate to Trnka-Amrhein that this may be a remarkable discovery. As La Brujula Verde notes:
“Upon examining the papyrus, Trnka-Amrhein realized that it contained fragments of a tragedy. To confirm her suspicions, she used the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, a comprehensive digital database of ancient Greek texts maintained by the University of California, Irvine. Her findings indicated that these were previously unknown fragments of works by Euripides, a playwright whose lost plays have long intrigued scholars.”
Consulting with Euripidean expert John Gibert, the two put the papyrus images through heavy analysis and even more intense scrutiny to be sure they were right before they declared that they had found new, previously unknown fragments of two of Euripides’ plays.
After ensuring that “the text aligned with the tragic and metrical style characteristic of Euripides,” it was revealed that this papyrus contained portions from two of the Euripidean plays that exist only in fragments, Polyidus and Ino. 22 of the lines on the papyrus were previously known to scholars, but as La Brujula Verde notes, “80 percent of the material was entirely new.”
“We don’t believe there’s been a discovery of this magnitude since the 1960s” John Gibert said of the discovery. Gibert and Trnka-Amrhein presented their findings in June of this year to a panel of 13 experts in Washington D.C. and had their first edition of the fragment accepted for publication in August.
Michael Natale is a news editor for the Hearst Enthusiast Group. His stories have appeared in Popular Mechanics, Best Products, and Runner's World.
