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Derveni papyrus vies fro UNESCO distinction

The oldest "book" of Europe, the Derveni papyrus is a candidate for inclusion on the list of UNESCO.

It is the only readable papyrus that has survived in Greece and the most ancient manuscript of Europe. So Derveni papyrus, written around 340-320 BC copying an older version of the end of the 5th century BC, will be a candidate for inclusion in the list of UNESCO, in the category of documented Heritage Monument.
For this to happen
it should be totally exposed. This was the main reason that the issue of inclusion of all sections of the papyrus in the permanent exhibition of the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki was discussed yesterday, at the Council of Museums.
The other reason was that the museum, which by 2004 one out of the nine tables with 266 fragments of the manuscript, has long wanted to expose them
in toto.
The Derveni papyrus is an ancient Greek papyrus roll that was found in 1962. It is a philosophical treatise that is an allegorical commentary on an Orphic poem, a theogony concerning the birth of the gods, produced in the circle of the philosopher Anaxagoras in the second half of the 5th century BC, making it "the most important new piece of evidence about Greek philosophy and religion to come to light since the Renaissance" (Janko 2005). It dates to around 340 BC, during the reign of Philip II of Macedon, making it Europe's oldest surviving manuscript. It was finally published in 2006.

The roll was found on 15 January 1962 at a site in Derveni, Macedonia, northern Greece, on the road from Thessaloniki to Kavala. The site is a nobleman's grave in a necropolis that was part of a rich cemetery belonging to the ancient city of Lete. It is the oldest surviving manuscript in the Western tradition and one of the very few surviving papyri found in Greece. Archaeologists recovered the charred papyrus scroll from ashes atop the slabs of the tomb. It survived in the humid Greek soil, which is unfavorable to the conservation of papyri, because it was carbonized (hence dried) in the nobleman’s funeral pyre. The papyrus is kept in the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki.

The text is a commentary on a hexameter poem ascribed to Orpheus. Fragments of the poem are quoted. The poem begins with the words "Close the doors, you uninitiated", a famous admonition to secrecy, recounted by Plato. The theogony described in the poem has Nyx (Night) give birth to Heaven (Uranus), who becomes the first king. Cronus follows and takes the kingship from Uranus, but he is likewise succeeded by Zeus.

Zeus, having "heard oracles from his father", goes to the sanctuary of Night, who tells him "all the oracles which afterwards he was to put into effect." Upon hearing them, Zeus "swallowed the phallus [of the king Uranus] who first had ejaculated the brilliance of heaven."[5]

The text was not officially published for forty-four years after its discovery (though three partial editions were published). A team of experts was assembled in autumn 2005 led by A. L. Pierris of the Institute for Philosophical studies and Dirk Obbink, director of the Oxyrhynchus papyrus project at the University of Oxford, with the help of modern multispectral imaging techniques by Roger Macfarlane and Gene Ware of Brigham Young University to attempt a better approach to the edition of a difficult text. Meanwhile, the papyrus has been published by scholars from Thessaloniki (Tsantsanoglou et al., below), which provides a complete text of the papyrus based on autopsy of the fragments, with photographs and translation. More work clearly remains to be done (see Janko 2006, below).