According to today’s Guardian, a recently rediscovered (and to some degree reconstructed) Aeschylus play about the Trojan War is to be performed by the Cypriot national theatre company.
Aeschylus’ take on the Trojan War took the form of a trilogy of dramas of which only Agamemnon was thought to have survived. Out of 90-some plays Aeschylus is thought to have written, only seven survived into the modern age. Most of the texts were lost in the torching of the Library at Alexandria. However, apparently partial copies of this play, Achilles, were retrieved from a mummy’s coffin in Egypt. It seems that mummies were frequently packed in loose paper and somebody used a copy of the play with their dearly departed.
I would think this to be the longest period between performances of a play in theatre history.
The whole thing brings to mind the image of some future archeologist rediscovering the lost works of L. Ron Hubbard by digging through boxes of unwanted Christmas presents, but that’s just me…
Don’t want to seem picky, but Agamemnon forms part of the complete trilogy, Oresteia, with Choephoroi and Eumenides. None of the Trojan trilogy has survived, so this is pretty exciting if you like that kind of thing.
Menander’s works turned up in this fashion through the twentieth century, albeit in a rather fragmentary form.
And, curiously, that’s basically how Cleopatra’s signature was found in Berlin a couple of years back.
Chris: I stand corrected. I studied the Greeks so long ago that Socrates taught my prof. I’ve forgottten a bit.
Greg: I remember my world history prof – who had done a bit of digging in the Pacific northwest in his youth – saying that arecheology wasn’t usually about forbidden palaces and tombs, it was mostly about sifting through dead people’s garbage.