Archaeologists discovered a papyrus with a passage from Homer’s Iliad inside a mummy. It was not a fragment that ended up there by chance: the papyrus had been carefully placed on the deceased’s abdomen during embalming.
The discovery was made by researchers from the Institute of Research on the Ancient Near East at the University of Barcelona during excavations in Oxyrhynchus, one of the largest cities of Greco-Roman Egypt, about 190 kilometers south of Cairo. For historians, the site is almost legendary. Thanks to the dry climate and the absence of dense later construction, thousands of papyri have survived here: from philosophical treatises and works by ancient authors to everyday notes, school exercises and even complaints about neighbors. As it turns out, people have not changed all that much in the last couple of thousand years.
For now, scientists cannot say with confidence whether the Iliad itself was regarded as a sacred object or whether the papyrus was used in a ritual for another reason. But the very fact that it appeared inside a mummy is already unique. In effect, this is the first known case in which a Greek literary text has been found as part of mummification or in a similar funerary context.
That is what makes the find especially interesting. Egypt of that period was a vast cultural crossroads, where Egyptian religious traditions, the Greek language and the Roman world intertwined. People could worship Osiris, read Homer and exist within several cultural systems at once — and the find from Oxyrhynchus unexpectedly shows that very clearly.
