Iliad Papyrus Uncovered Near Ancient Egyptian Mummy Tomb
Archaeologists from the University of Barcelona’s Oxyrhynchus Mission uncovered a 2,000-year-old papyrus containing a passage from Homer’s Iliad outside a mummy’s wrappings in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt. The text, likely from Book 2’s Catalog of Ships, may have been used as a magical amulet or guide for the afterlife, with six years of work stabilizing and translating the fragment revealing Greek literary texts in its original Greco-Egyptian context.
