OXFORD, England, May 19 (UPI) -- Scholars at Oxford University used technology developed by NASA to map Mars to read the once-lost texts of Sophocles.
Scientists discovered earlier that multispectral imaging, as adapted by Brigham Young University, allowed them to read texts buried since Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D.
Now, they have turned to the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, a collection of more than 500,000 pieces of papyrus found in 1896 in garbage dumps of the vanished Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus, about 100 miles south of Cairo.
The city flourished for almost 1,000 years from the fourth century B.C. to the seventh century A.D.
In recent weeks, the Chicago Tribune reported, Oxford researchers deciphered a 70-line fragment from a lost tragedy by Sophocles and a 30-line fragment from Archilochos, a Greek soldier-poet who chronicled the Trojan Wars.
The Archilochos fragment confirmed a long-held scholarly suspicion: The Greeks got lost on their way to invade Troy.
