The papyrus scroll of short poems might have been no more than mute papier mache as it lay over an Egyptian mummy's chest as a protective covering for over two thousand years. But it is mum no more.

Discovered in the early 1990s and deciphered by experts from the University of Milan since then, the epigrams - attributed by many to the poet Posidippus - are now evidence that poems written in the 3rd century BC took on their meaning from the way they were arranged in poetry 'books.'

Which is what Dr Kathryn Gutzwiller, a University of Cincinnati classicist, was arguing from what she calls "circumstantial evidence," in the book she'd begun writing in 1992.

The Posidippus scroll has vindicated her thesis, she says. "I heard about the papyrus in 1992 or 1993," she tells GreeceNow, "but information about it was closely guarded until publication in 2001.

I knew that there were nine sections and that it was probably Posidippus, but I couldn't tell anything about arrangement."

Now, after a year of working on the new Posidippus scroll herself, Gutzwiller says it seems it is a book of poetry by a single author. She held a conference of experts in early November to examine different aspects of the papyrus, which she calls the most important discovery in decades.

"The last exciting discovery, in the 1980s" she explains, "was of some lines of Simonides, a lyric poet of the fifth century (BC), but these fragments were much briefer than the new papyrus."

The papyrus of Posidippus, a Macedonian connected to the Greek Ptolemies who ruled Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great, is a big find because it is so long and in such good shape, she adds.

The papyrus contains 112 epigrams. Two of them were previously known, and known to be the work of Posidippus. Gutzwiller says that because none of the other poems are signed to indicate different authorship, there is no reason to suppose there is more than one writer.

Ancient poets, modern views

Gutzwiller is an expert in epigrams, short personal poems popular among readers in the Hellenistic period, which began with the death of Alexander in 323 BC. Experts say the new Posidippus papyrus is intriguing because many of the poems on it are about the lives of women. Like this:

"An old woman, I, Batis, spent my old age with infants, as a servant hired by Athenodice of Phocaea. I taught them to prepare wool, and varied yarns for their headbands, and the weaving of hair-nets; and then they were already going to the threshold of their bridal chambers, when they buried me, the old woman who instructed them in these mysteries."

Gutzwiller says personal poetry came into vogue as the large kingdoms carved out of Alexander's empire eclipsed the city-state.

"Since individuals no longer had much ability to influence their political situations," she explains, "the focus was more on personal or professional relationships."

That focus on the personal by poets who were often "displaced from their native cities," adds Gutzwiller, makes the ancient epigrams appealing to people today. "It does sound very modern, doesn't it?"

Not all the experts agree when Gutzwiller says, "The turn to the personal in the early Hellenistic period bears a good deal of similarity to the modern world."

But they do agree that the Posidippus scroll is important because it is a single text.

"It shows us that 'Hellenistic poetry' is a more complex phenomenon than we thought, " says Gutzwiller.

Unravelling the complexity exhumed with the papyrus is itself a complex task. Gutwiller's three-day conference in November brought together experts in papyrology, literary studies, Ptolemaic history, the art and image culture of the period and Latin literature.

"For the past year scholars have worked on improving the text of the papyrus, studying the metre, identifying individuals mentioned there, and doing some analysis of the sections," says Gutzwiller.

"We hope that through an interdisciplinary discourse we can better understand the purpose of this epigram collection, especially whether it was designed to be read as a poetry book."

(One reviewer of Gutzwiller's book, Poetic Garlands: Hellenistic Epigrams in Context (University of California, 1998, $45.00), calls the Hellenistic epigram "a sophisticated literary form that evinces the period's aesthetic preference for the miniature, the intricate, and the fragmented." But not everyone agrees that the evidence is strong enough to warrant Gutzwiller's conclusions.)