Daydreams  

What excites me most about these newly discovered ancient texts is the prospect of puzzling over the nature of their relationship with the literature of later years (eg now). Here's what I mean by this. Obviously there are some ancient texts that occupy the center of the Western tradition; this is not only because they are compelling in and of themselves, but also because they've been written about over and over again by subsequent (and subservient?) authors. And the arrangement begs the question: was it the depth of these ancient texts that set the course of Western thinking, or is the thinking of these ancients continually being subtly reinvented by those who come after?

It's not clear whether any of these newly discovered texts are complete, but there are certainly some pieces (work by Sophocles, or previously unknown Gospels) that might have had some claim to influence had they not been lost. This would seem to present a sort of found experimental design for thinking about these questions of influence -- do the newly discovered works prefigure later Western thought, or do they suggest unexplored paths? Obviously it's not a question that will be concusively answered, but it certainly provokes.

ALSO: Mark Liberman has more on the text fragments in question. Near the end he mentions the Urim and Thummim, the two stones Joseph Smith used to translate the golden plates on which the Book of Mormon was inscribed in an unknown language. I have always been fascinated by this story because the relationship between the stones and the plates (Liberman refers to "an older optical technology") is unknowable. It's certainly not translation in any sense that I would use the word; I've always been left with the impression that the plates themselves were entirely outside the process. So why include them at all in the story?

Apparently I am not the first one to have this concern.