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| Grenfell and Hunt in Egypt circa 1896 |
So important were these manuscripts to their owners that they were pitched.
Many important secular manuscripts also have been found in the dump, some hitherto unknown to scholarship.
It's a sobering commentary on human nature, well known to any good text critic, but as little appreciated now as the books themselves happened to be then.
[T]he provenance of many important collections is murky at best. ... In contrast to the Beatty and Bodmer collections, whose origins are archaeologically uncertified, the manuscripts deriving from Oxyrhynchus come from a genuine archaeological exploration, led by the redoubtable British scholars Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, who in 1896 struck gold while digging in a town dump in Egypt. So vast is the number of manuscripts they found—perhaps half a million, spanning centuries and languages, only a small portion of them Christian—that their publication, begun in 1898, had reached seventy-seven volumes by 2011. [Brent] Nongbri provides a helpful catalogue of all the Christian writings identified [there] to date [in God’s Library: The Archeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts].
