I’m not the kind of history buff who likes to hunt through old boxes of stuff and look through dusty attics to find history.  But that is often what it comes down to.  Finding valuable ancient documents and artifacts in the dustbins (garbage) of old houses, their ruins or under the earth covered over centuries ago.  But a good find is something to get the imagination working and sometimes there is the unexpected discovery of buried treasure of the historical kind that electrifies a century as no other can.

The Dead Sea Scrolls is perhaps the best known.  This is because of the references to a group who might have been precursors of Christians.  An earlier discovery by Solomon Schechter, the Cairo Geniza, contained the “holy” works interred there over the centuries because of the prohibition of burying or burning a document bearing the name of God.  Both of these discoveries are still being examined by scholars using new techniques to get under the grease, dirt and overlay of writing on earlier inscriptions covered up to save the valuable parchment, papyrus or early paper. The Oxyrhynchus Papyri from old and mostly forgotten
Egyptian garbage dumps, “a trove of classical material dating from the second century B.C. to the seventh century A.D.” has given us looks into the treasures of the ancient Greeks, particularly of their literary works.  Such deposits of written records, when too old and overwhelming in their mass, get thrown away and serendipity allows us to pore over them when their existence is discovered and the past opened up again.

The science involving infra-red light to read underlying writing beneath the dirt of centuries or the packrat’s predilection to save and reuse perfectly sound material despite what some earlier user wrote has been uncovering “lost” plays and poetry but miss the boat on being another “Dead Sea Scroll”.

Our garbage heaps are filled with mundane records required by the tax collectors to be saved for 5-7 years.  Then, what do we do with them?  We do not think of them as historical documents and put them in honored, safe and dry places where they can be used by the historians in the future.  We toss them out and they become the decaying detritus of our civilizations and at times are compacted into building blocks that extend our land out into the shores of the sea so that new generations can build their luxurious homes (the day of the “project” for the underclass is gone) and the bones of earlier buildings are buried under concrete and macadam. It is my dream that in one of those fragments of ancient papyrus there will be a mention and clue to the whereabouts of Nebuchadnezzar’s Pillar that the Book of Daniel describes in some detail. I could write a book about this.