3 min read
Archaeologists in Egypt opened a 1,600-year-old mummy and found that someone had tucked a copy of Homer’s Iliad into it. Not beside it. Into it, resting on the corpse’s abdomen, deliberately placed there during the embalming, like a bookmark left inside a body instead of a book. It is the first time anyone has found a work of literature used this way, and it is one of the strangest, most human things a tomb has coughed up in years.
What they found
The discovery came from Oxyrhynchus, an ancient site south of Cairo that has been gifting scholars scraps of the classical world for over a century. In a Roman-era tomb, a team uncovered a mummy dating to around the fourth century, and lying on its abdomen was a papyrus, positioned as part of the burial ritual rather than dropped in by accident. When researchers read it, they recognised the text at once: a passage from the Iliad, specifically the “Catalogue of Ships”, the long, famous roll-call of the Greek forces that sailed for Troy.
Why it is such a big deal
Papyrus fragments of Homer turn up at Oxyrhynchus fairly often; the place is practically a landfill of antique paperwork. What makes this one extraordinary is where it was and why. This is the first archaeological evidence of a Greek literary text being intentionally built into the mummification process itself, treated not as rubbish or padding but as something meaningful to send along with the dead. Somebody decided this person should be buried with Homer, the way a modern family might slip a beloved paperback or a photograph into a coffin.
The genuinely moving bit
Strip away the academic significance and what is left is oddly tender. Seventeen centuries ago, in Roman Egypt, someone loved this text, or this person, or both, enough to want the words to travel with them into whatever came next. We do not know if the dead person was a scholar, a poet, a teacher, or simply someone whose family thought the greatest story ever told would make decent company in the afterlife. The Catalogue of Ships is, of all things, essentially a very long list, and yet somebody chose it as a parting gift. People have always been strange and sentimental about the books they love. This is just the oldest, most literal proof of it we have ever dug up.
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Did you know: Oxyrhynchus is one of the most important archaeological sites on Earth for the written word, not because of its temples but because of its bins. The town’s ancient rubbish dumps, kept bone-dry by the desert, preserved hundreds of thousands of papyrus fragments, from tax receipts to lost plays, giving us a huge slice of everyday life in the classical world that would otherwise have rotted away.