Literature and history dot come. Oh, Hello and welcome to literature and history.

Episode 37, The New Comedy.

This show is on an ancient Greek play called Old Cantankerous, produced in 316

B.C. in the city of Athens, a little more than a century after the most famous works of Sophocles, Eurybides, and Aristophanes.

There is a part of the Nile River that runs from east to west.

It's deep in the central part of Egypt,

about halfway between Cairo and the northern border of Sudan.

This stretch of the Nile is a magic place for

archaeology. Follow the river south, 40 miles or so and you come to Thebes, home of Luxor Temple and the Valley of Kings, where the

tomb of Tootenkamun was discovered in 1922.

Just four miles west of the site that concerns us today is the town of Nagh Hamadi,

where a set of scrolls was discovered in 1945 that dramatically changed our understanding of the early evolution of Christianity and Second Temple Judaism.

But something else was discovered nearby in 1952.

It wasn't the intact tomb of a... by in 1952.

It wasn't the intact tomb of a New Kingdom Pharaoh complete with a shining gold mask.

It didn't quite have the scope of the Nag Hammadi Library, what was found in 1952 wasn't quite so earth-shattering as these.

What was found in 1952, just 10 miles east of n Hammadi was another collection of texts that we now call

the Bodmer-Papairai.

The Bodmer-Papairai were buried in the headquarters of an order of monks called the Pacomians, sometime around 200

CE, a very early Christian group known for their communitarian ethics.

Like many bundles of texts discovered at archaeological sites, the papyrae discovered in 1952

were a miscellaneous lot. The Bodmer papyrae included papyrus leaves in codex forms and

...