Abstract
The Derveni papyrus is the oldest surviving Greek manuscript. It was found carbonized near Thessaloniki, Greece, in 1962, and preserves in a fragmentary manner a previously unknown prose work written in Ionic-Attic by an unidentifiable author who interprets a theogonic poem ascribed to the mythical poet and sage Orpheus as a coded cosmological theory.
A carbonized papyrus-roll found in 1962 near Derveni, a site about 10 km northwest of Thessaloniki, Greece, among the debris from a funeral pyre that had been strewn over …