Homer in a mummy

In the Egyptian city of Al-Bahnasa, the Oxyrhynchus of antiquity, archaeologists from the University of Barcelona and Egypt’s Institute of the Ancient Near East discovered inside a mummy a piece of papyrus with the catalogue of ships from Iliad 2.

From a University of Barcelona press release:

The mummy was found at Oxyrhynchus, a town on the banks of a Nile River branch called Bahr Yussef. By 400 CE, the vital urban locale was heavily influenced by Greco-Roman culture — a fact documented in over two centuries of archaeological excavations.

“Since the late 19th century, a huge number of papyri have been discovered at Oxyrhynchus, including Greek literary texts of great importance,” Ignasi-Xavier Adiego, a University of Barcelona philologist and Oxyrhynchus project director, said in a statement. This isn’t the first time researchers noted Greek papyri incorporated in a mummification process at the site. However, previous examples were “mainly magical,” according to Adiego.... “The real novelty is finding a literary papyrus in a funerary context,” said Adiego.

Oxyrhyncus is of course the source of many fragments of Sappho’s poetry, found in an ancient rubbish dump.

Thanks, Lu!

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