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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1898 Excerpt:...part of the second book of the Iliad, with interesting scholia or notes; while from the cemetery were collected no less than 480 fragments of papyri, consisting of deeds, letters, accounts, &c, from the latest Ptolemaic age to that which preceded the Arab invasion. At Gurob a still richer discovery was made. In an early Greek cemetery, where the dead had been buried in Egyptian style, Prof. Petrie noticed that the mummy cases were composed of pieces of inscribed papyrus. On subsequent examination, these papyri were found to contain--besides numerous official and private documents--a considerable portion of the Phaedo of Plato and fragments of the Antiope, a lost play of Euripides. From the dated records found with them, it is certain that these classical texts could not have been written later than 250 B. C, and may be a century earlier. They are, therefore, by far the oldest manuscripts we possess of any Greek author. The Plato is specially important, as showing numerous variations from the received text. The "Flinders Petrie Papyri" have been admirably edited by Prof. J. P. Mahaffy, with 48 autotype plates, for the Memoirs of the Royal Irish Academy. The task of papyrus-hunting was now taken up by Mr. Bernard P. Grenfell, to whom the University of Oxford awarded a Craven fellowship in 1893 for this special purpose. For two seasons he worked in Egypt as a student, in close association with Prof. Petrie; during the last two seasons his work has been on account of the Egypt Exploration Fund. The results of the first period are shown in his Revenue Laws of Ptolemy Philadelphus and his Alexandrian Erotic Fragment, &c., both published by the Clarendon Press in 1896. The former is a scholarly edition, with a portfolio of 13 plates, of the large...