TATAREVO, BULGARIA—Archaeology in Bulgaria reports that researchers from the Plovdiv Museum of Archaeology discovered a pottery vessel covered with lines of printed letters in the fourth and deepest tomb in the Great Mound in Tatarevo. The vessel dates to the first century A.D. and is a balsamarium, made for holding balsam. “This is a unique find because it is the first time a parchment with the text of a literary work has ever been found in Bulgaria—and in a ‘negative’ in which the letters are backwards,” said lead archaeologist Kostadin Kostadinov. The words, written in Greek with ink made from cinder and natural dyes, had been written on a piece of parchment that was then wrapped around the balsamarium. The parchment has almost completely disintegrated, but the writing has now been identified as part of the poem “Prayer to the Muses” by the Athenian politician and poet Solon, who lived in the sixth century B.C. The excavation is funded by Plovdiv Municipality to protect the Thracian burials from treasure hunters. To read more about manuscripts from antiquity, go to "The Charred Scrolls of Herculaneum."
