Tombs in ancient Oxyrhynchus

The ancient site of Oxyrhynchus, south of modern Cairo, is best known for the papyrus remains that were discovered back in 1897 (see: City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish by Peter Parsons). It took many years to start deciphering the many bits and pieces, a process that is still ongoing, as detailed in my earlier post, Get involved with Oxyrhynchus.
 
This work is full of surprises. For instance, the 1922 reconstruction and translation of a poem by Sappho of Lesbos, who lived circa 630-570 BC. By 2005, the missing part of this poem had been found on a papyrus held at the University of Cologne. It is wonderful and unique to finally have a complete poem by one of the greatest lyric poetesses of antiquity.
 
By now, it transpires that 80 volumes of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri have been published, thanks to the relentless efforts of Professor Peter Parsons of the University of Oxford. The documents have largely contributed to a better understanding and knowledge of the history of Egypt and Rome.
 

More than a hundred years after the site was discovered, excavations are carried out by the Institute of Ancient Near East Studies of the University of Barcelona. It is hard to believe that Oxyrhynchus once was the third-largest city in Egypt, as it boomed under the Ptolemies, who ruled after the death of Alexander. It was Christianized with the rest of Egypt, as testified by the many churches and monasteries that were built. During Roman and Byzantine occupation, however, the city gradually declined. Life changed dramatically after the arrival of the Muslims in 641 AD, and Oxyrhynchus was eventually abandoned.

 
The discovery of the papyrus garbage dump slowly revived the general interest in this forgotten city. Since 2020, Spanish archaeologists have concentrated their efforts on the city’s necropolis. Each excavation season has its own harvest of tombs and grave goods. In 2023, for instance, six funerary complexes from Persian (Sassanid), Roman, and Coptic times and 16 individual tombs were discovered.
 

Last year, in 2024, a collection of 52 mummies from Ptolemaic times was exposed. Thirteen of the bodies had golden tongues in their mouth, a clear sign of preparation for the afterlife, and one had a gold plate on its fingernails. Precious gifts like scarabs, amulets of Egyptian gods, and a terracotta statuette of the god Harpocrates (the Greek and Roman version of the Egyptian child-god Horus) were also retrieved. Another tomb counted three burial chambers whose walls were covered with texts and colorful funerary scenes depicting several Egyptian gods. Also, four limestone sarcophagi have been found.

 
This all sounds very promising as the finds in Oxyrhynchus give new insights into life and death during Ptolemaic and Roman times.

[Pictures from the Universitat de Barcelona]

Saving documents and books in antiquity

Nowadays, saving our documents and information on our computers is very obvious. Before the digital era, we relied on typewriters and printers to distribute our pamphlets, advertisements, letters, and books. 

It is hard to imagine that in antiquity nothing of the kind existed, but then the needs were entirely different. Public information, laws, decrees, and other important notices were inscribed on stone slabs or posted on walls in conspicuous places throughout the city, and eventually shared with other cities.  

Exchanging documents and letters over longer distances, as during Alexander’s campaigns, required writing on papyrus, a lightweight material that could be easily transported. His correspondence with Antipater, Olympias, Aristotle, Sisygambis, governors, and generals all over his ever-growing empire required an active exchange of news and information.

Eumenes and Callisthenes, serving as Alexander’s secretaries, must have been very busy and very organized. We tend to forget that they also kept copies of Alexander’s correspondence, official documents, and perhaps private letters as well. This becomes apparent when Eumenes’ tent went up in flames after a conflict that arose as Nearchus was preparing the fleet to sail the Southern Sea. 

Alexander had exhausted his own treasury and had to borrow money from his friends, including Eumenes, to finance Nearchus’ expedition. His secretary was to contribute 300 talents, but being stingy, he gave only 100 talents. Alexander did not accept Eumenes’ excuse that it was not without difficulty and decided to set his friend’s tent on fire. He expected Eumenes to rush his money out, and thus admit he had been lying. The plan went wrong, and the tent burned down entirely, leaving a clump of smelted gold and silver worth one thousand talents. In the process, Alexander’s archives were reduced to ashes. It is Plutarch who tells us that Alexander asked several governors and generals to send Eumenes copies of the papers that had been destroyed. This proves that Alexander did indeed keep a record of his correspondence! 

We so often read of papers and books that have only partially survived or are only known second-hand or not at all, except for the title. This situation is inherent to the mindset of the time and to the degradation of the natural support used (papyrus). 

Papyrus is a vegetal product and a very practical writing support, but it is also fragile. It has been calculated that papyrus documents had a lifespan of a maximum of one hundred years. This may have suited the needs at the time, but the chances of having them still around two thousand years later are very slim. 

Chances of survival were greater if there were many copies of a text, like, for instance, for theater plays. Yet, professional writers were expensive, and the costs were borne by the author. In Roman times, wealthy citizens could afford to have certain scrolls copied for their own use, but they would hardly survive after the Fall of the Roman Empire. 

Under exceptional conditions, some scrolls or bits of papyrus, however, reached us. The most telling example is the scrolls that survived the fire in Herculaneum after the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Only recently have we been able to decipher their content without having to unroll the brittle carbonized scrolls (see: Reading the papyrus scrolls from Herculaneum). 

Another situation developed in Egypt. The garbage dump in Oxyrhynchus that served as fuel to the local population in the 19^th century appeared to contain a huge amount of hitherto unknown papyrus texts ranging from the Ptolemaic era to the Muslim conquests in the 7^th century AD. The papyri consist of private letters and public documents, such as a variety of official correspondence, theater plays, records, sales, wills, and inventories. The deciphering of the papyri is ongoing, as only a handful of scholars are capable of recognizing where the bit of papyrus text belongs. 

When parchment was introduced in the 2^nd century BC, documents stood a better chance of survival, although even animal skins had their limits. However, parchment was extremely expensive to make. 

With the passage of time, interest and taste evolved and changed. Treatises, studies, analyses, and even books and poems went out of fashion and vanished altogether. 

As the writing supports were decaying, it is not surprising that documenting Alexander’s life is a nearly impossible task, despite the second-hand recordings by Arrian, Diodorus, Curtius, and Plutarch, who could still access some original documents (see: Eyewitness accounts of Alexander’s life).

[Top picture Derveni papyrus 340 BC, Thessaloniki Museum.
Bottom picture from Archaeology News, Digs & Discoveries] 

Rewriting the events leading to the Battle of Gaugamela

Our history of Alexander the Great is mainly based on what the Greek sources tell us, picked up by later authors like Arrian, Diodorus, Curtius, and Plutarch. We have ignored what Persian sources could say because of the difficulty deciphering the often fragmentary texts written on clay tablets from the Babylonian Library or on papyri from the Oxyrhynchus site in Egypt.

Watching a documentary from 2009 of Michael Wood searching for the plain of Gaugamela in war-ridden northern Iraq revived the battle scenario of Alexander against Darius as seen from the Persian point of view, i.e., contemporary to Alexander. Michael Wood had an in-depth conversation with Prof. Irving Finkel of the British Museum, handling several cuneiform tablets.  

These cuneiform clay tablets belong to the Astronomical Diaries kept in the temple of the Babylonian god Marduk. The diaries contain daily observations of the sky and all kinds of information about the current political events, the water level of the Euphrates and Tigris, the food prices, and other various topics, and the meteorological records. Over the past two centuries, millions of these tablets have surfaced from all over Mesopotamia. The majority has not yet been deciphered, leaving us with wide lacunas. Therefore, the work of Prof. Irving Finkle is very commendable. 

With Michael Wood, he concentrated on three lines on these tablets that require careful consideration in the case of Gaugamela. 

That month, the eleventh [corresponds to 18 September 331 BC], panic occurred in the camp before the king. The Macedonians encamped in front of the king [must be Darius at Arbela].

This inscription suggests that the Persian soldiers were demoralized or were reluctant to fight. 

The twenty-fourth [corresponds to 1 October 331 BC], in the morning, the king of the world [meaning Alexander as King of Asia] erected his standard [lacuna]. Opposite each other they fought and a heavy defeat of the troops. The king, his troops deserted him and to their cities [they went] They fled to the land of the Guti [meaning the road to Ecbatana]

These lines shed a very different light on the battle as opposed to what Greek historians wrote about Darius turning his chariot around and leaving his soldiers behind (see: "The troops of the king deserted him"). If the Persian troops left their king, that would be a totally different situation.

Prof. Irving understands that “the king’s men deserted him” means the Persians refused to fight. This may very well involve Mazaeus at Gaugamela, as he was holding the right flank facing Parmenion’s contingent. Was the confrontation on that end of the long Persian front really as fierce as our Greek narratives want us to believe, with Parmenion’s flank crumbling down? Or was it mainly a show to save face vis-à-vis King Darius?

If the soldiers on that flank (the Persian right) were not ready to engage in a fight, Alexander could more easily concentrate on his own right flank. Thus, he executed his whirling move and rode towards Darius through the formed gap. Darius fled from the battlefield, but it transpired that many of his troops had turned back before their king did. 

We may wonder whether, instead of an act of bravery or military genius on Alexander’s part, the battle was won thanks to the bribes of some of Darius’ generals, including Mazaeus (see: Two key afterthoughts on Gaugamela). 

On the eleventh [corresponds to 18 October 331 BC], in Sippar [this is just north of Babylon] an order of Alexander to the Babylonians was sent as follows: 'Into your houses I shall not enter.'

Here, the tablets are quoting Alexander verbatim as he confirms that he would not enter the houses of Babylon. In other words, he officially declares that his troops will not plunder the city. This was clearly a pre-arranged gesture. 

The above calls for some further explanation. 

Let’s consider the nearly obvious bribe of Mazaeus. We have to go back to the banks of the Euphrates, where Hephaistion was building two bridges over the Euphrates at its narrowest point near Thapsacus (see: Crossing the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers). The Persian general had arrived on the other side and watched Hephaistion’s construction progress for several days. Hephaistion stopped his operation short of the opposite riverbank as he did not want to see the end of his bridges destroyed by Mazaeus. Work was at a stalemate till Alexander appeared with the bulk of his army, and Mazaeus turned around to scorch more earth in front of the enemy’s advance as ordered by Darius. 

Mazaeus had 2,000 Greek mercenaries at his service. They must have been happy to talk to the Macedonians on the opposite bank to exchange the latest news during the stalemate. Robin Lane Fox implies that Mazaeus (who, having been satrap of Cilicia, spoke Greek) at that time could have forged some agreement with Hephaistion in view of the upcoming battle. At first sight, this seems outlandish, but this is very plausible on second thought. Hephaistion was often sent on diplomatic missions by Alexander, and the events on the bank of the Euphrates may well have been one such occasion. While he was waiting, Hephaistion had ample time to consult Alexander, still marching towards him. Such a private agreement would inevitably shed totally new light on the upcoming fight at Gaugamela (see: Two key afterthoughts on Gaugamela). 

As soon as Darius left the battlefield, Mazaeus followed suit and rode to Babylon. When Alexander approached the city some three weeks later, he was met by Mazaeus, who surrendered himself and the city. This has been recorded by Curtius and certainly fits into the prearranged agreement! 

Babylon was a well-defended stronghold with a 68 km-long wall that would have been a tough nut to crack had Mazaeus not surrendered it to the new King of Asia (see: Babylon and Alexander’s reorganization of the army). 

In his search for the battlefield location, Michael Wood also talked to Lt General Sir Robert Fry, head of British Forces in Iraq, who was in charge of his security. The general is a historian and fervent admirer of Alexander the Great, with his own views on the military aspect. He says that, in figures, the Battle of Gaugamela was perhaps the biggest in history until Napoleon! It decided the fate of Asia. 

He further adds that - like all great leaders in history - Alexander left no weapon unused – even the gods. Alexander did not make his last sacrifice to Phoebus because he was afraid, but he wished fear and terror on the Persians! True to his generalship, Robert Fry marvels at the logistics of bringing an army of 50,000 to Iraq, 80,000 to Persia, and even more to India. Imagine the long supply line! 

The general also looks at the upcoming battle from Darius’ side and confirms that he has taken all necessary precautions. He had a superior cavalry with heavier horses, had the strength of numbers, and the battle itself was well prepared. The plan of the Persian king was to breach the phalanx in order to break the cohesion of the Macedonian army at its center and then envelop the outnumbered Macedonians. Darius had not expected Alexander to stretch the army to his right and create an opening to ride straight at him. The battle was not about their numbers, the general continued, but it came down to the decisions of two individuals. 

These are fascinating statements and ideas. General Fry ends with words along the line of “Alexander’s idea of defeating the Persians may be his idea of linking the eastern and western empires by trade routes and by an army integrated in ethnic terms. These are extraordinary imaginative ideas! Alexander was a globalist. He would thoroughly understand the world today.” How true that is!

[Pictures 2 and 3 are from Oliver Stone's movie Alexander] 

Deciphering cuneiform texts

Translating the content of tens of thousands of clay tablets is a lengthy and time-consuming process that can only be compared with the huge amount of papyrus scraps that were recovered at Oxyrhynchus. As far as the papyri are concerned, a new computer-based program has been put into place (see: Get involved with Oxyrhynchus) to help and accelerate the translations.

Reading cuneiform signs is a far more complicated operation, but it is heartwarming to learn that scientists have been able to get extra help from their computer technology as well. The main problem in processing these tablets is the fact that the signs are three-dimensional and that the cuneiform characters are very diverse.

Thanks to a breakthrough at the University of Chicago, they are now able to make automated transcriptions, especially of those texts that were recovered from the Persepolis area in 1933. Our knowledge about the Achaemenid history is growing rapidly.

This new technology enables the creation of a database management platform, and over the last five years, the system has improved significantly. As a result, scholars have created a good machine learning procedure. Currently, over 60 terabytes of digitized high-resolution images have been created and are being made ready to return to Iran

The present collection has led to the creation of a dictionary of the Elamite language that can be used by today’s students. The machine learning model can successfully decipher cuneiform signs with an accuracy of approximately 80% already. Being able to translate and identify most of the repetitive sections frees a lot of time for those experts whose task remains to analyze and interpret the difficult place names or signs that still need closer study.

In the future, the deciphering system can be shared with other archaeologists to retrain it in such a way that cuneiform languages other than Elamite can be translated as well. There is still so much to be discovered!

What Oxyrhynchus revealed so far

Several years ago, I was at the Getty Villa in Malibu to be treated to two theatrical plays from antiquity, one Greek, The Woman from Samos by Menander, and one Roman, Casina by Plautus.

Set at dusk in the Peristyle of the Villa from which the statues had been removed for the occasion, it was a unique setting to see an old play in the New World.

Evidently, the Greek play caught my attention, and it was explained that Menander’s The Woman from Samos had only recently been recovered from the Egyptian desert and had never been performed before. 

The Egyptian desert as the finding place was an odd fact that I could not place at the time until, one day, I learned about the papyrus heap of Oxyrhynchus (see: Hellenica Oxyrhynchia by P.J. McKechnie and S.J. Kern and Get involved with Oxyrhynchus). At this dumpsite, many Greek texts that had been lost for centuries eventually surfaced. Large fragments have been salvaged, like works by Sappho and Alcaeus, poems by Pindar, and considerable bits of authors like Euripides and Sophocles. Also recovered were the most complete diagrams from Euclid’s Elements, a life of Euripides by Satyrus the Peripatetic, and an epitome of seven of the 120 books of Livy that are otherwise lost.

But among the pile of papyri, Menander benefited most from the finds at Oxyrhynchus, with fragments of Misoumenos, Dis Exapaton, Epitrepontes, Karchedonios, Dyskolos (The Bad-Tempered Man or The Malcontent), and Kolax. At last, we have enough works to recognize his status in the Greek theater.

Menander was an Athenian tragedian who lived in the 4th century BC. He was born around 342 BC, and who knows, Alexander may have heard of him or even seen one of his plays while he was in Asia. Menander was a prolific and much-imitated writer whose success was recognized for centuries after his death. The Romans scrambled to collect unknown plays, which they adapted and translated into Latin. Unfortunately, none of Menander’s plays survived until this chance discovery in the Egyptian desert. 

As I was flipping through a pile of papers, the very program from the Getty Villa fell into my hands again – a most gratifying rekindling of memories. It had been an evening I would never forget.

The popular The Woman from Samos is a play of deception and misunderstanding in which a marriage that everyone desires almost fails to happen, two women and a baby are almost ruined, and a loving father almost loses his only son, because the people at home and the people abroad have both been doing things behind each other's backs - but somehow everything ends happily after all. It is a complicated story, yet played in such a way that it keeps our attention on edge. It was, of course, executed in English translation. 

Happy Birthday!

Today, we are celebrating Alexander’s birthday. This is very unusual because we have only rare dates from antiquity that we can pin down and match to our modern calendar. Luckily for us, Alexander’s birthday is such an exception.

Unfortunately, we have no picture of the baby or of young Alexander. In fact, we only have one single picture of Alexander made during his lifetime, i.e. the tiny ivory head found in his father’s tomb at Vergina. All other statues, busts, reliefs, mosaics, intaglios, medallions and coins of Alexander the Great are either copies of contemporary works or creations from later centuries. His favorite sculptor Lysippos has transpired through later copies but none of Apelles’ paintings have survived. Imagine what it would mean to have just one of those originals!

The same goes for Alexander’s historians as nearly all contemporary literature is lost and we have to be content with “second hand” information gleaned by later authors who still had access to the original texts. My secret hope is that one day some of those original documents may be discovered among the Oxyrhynchus papyri that are still being deciphered.

Alexander truly keeps us busy, and rightfully so. Many happy returns, dear Alexander, may you live on forever in the memory of the world!

[Picture from Pinterest]

Papyri, a precious source of information

As far back as the ancient Egyptians (i.e., as far back as 4,000 BC), papyrus was used as writing support for essential documents. Manufacturing papyrus is an art by itself and a very time-consuming operation. The papyrus reed has to be picked upstream of the Nile, where the stems are harvested. After being cleaned, the triangular stems were cut into long strips. These thin strips were then laid out in two layers, one horizontal and one vertical, that were then pressed together and dried to form the ultimate papyrus sheet. Thanks to its natural gum, these sheets could also be laid side by side to produce a roll, which, when inscribed, would become the known scrolls from antiquity. It is mind-blowing to think how much reed had to be turned into papyrus to produce all the literature from antiquity. We cannot even imagine how many people were involved in making papyrus, whose production must have been organized on an industrial scale.

In the dry desert climate of Egypt, such scrolls could safely survive for centuries, as was proven by the thousands of pieces that emerged from the garbage heap at Oxyrhynchus. Elsewhere, documents were primarily preserved by chance. One such find happened, for instance, in Herculaneum, the Italian city buried under a thick layer of volcanic ash following the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.

In those days, Herculaneum, just like Pompeii, was a plush resort town where rich people from Rome sought solace from the summer heat. One such Roman was Lucius Calpurnis Piso Caesoninus, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, who built a grand seaside villa lavishly decorated with more than eighty bronze and marble statues of the finest quality. This is the Villa that Paul Getty copied in Malibu, California, to house his collection of antiquities.

Besides the impressive collection of artwork, Piso’s Villa also yielded a library of some 2,000 scrolls, the only one that survived from the classical world. Unfortunately, we cannot read any of these scrolls since they turned into lumps of charcoal, the result of the pyroclastic blast that carbonized the papyrus before the city caught fire and sank into oblivion under the volcanic ashes. When first discovered, these black burnt logs were not recognized as scrolls, and some were hacked into pieces. A later conservator of the Vatican tried in the 18th century to painstakingly unroll them, spending four years on one single scroll, and many chips just broke off. Even in the 1980s, experts from Oxford University could not do much, and the reading was challenging even under changing light or under a microscope. Manipulating the papyri did more damage than good as fragments crumbled to dust. Towards the end of the 1990s, infrared light helped to decipher some of the texts, followed by multi-spectral imaging providing more precise images of the letters and texts. Unrolling the scrolls was the major problem. In 2009, the Institut de France in Paris used Computerized Tomography (CT) scans to read the internal surfaces of the scrolls. The task was tough even with this modern technology since the rolls were tightly wound and creased. The easy sections could be converted into 2D images, but another problem arose when it was discovered that the chemistry of the ink blended with the chemistry of the paper; the main reason is that ancient ink does not contain any metal.

This all means that we may need new technology or procedures to come to our rescue to decipher these scrolls that may contain lost works from known or even unknown antique authors.

The Hellenistic world, which ruled the Mediterranean roughly from 323 to 31 BC, counted several major libraries, the best known and probably the greatest being the Library of Alexandria, founded in 300 BC. It was severely damaged by Julius Caesar’s fire in 48 BC and was finally destroyed at some time between 270 and 275 AD during the attack of Emperor Aurelius. Next in order was the Library of Pergamon, with some 200,000 volumes, which Marc Anthony “generously” gave to his wife, Queen Cleopatra. The Roman Empire created its own libraries in Rome, often apparently located in separate buildings containing Greek and Latin works. We possess a catalog listing all the facilities of Rome from circa 350 AD, in which no less than 29 public libraries are mentioned!

It is clear that since Hellenistic times, many people were literate and could read either or both Greek and Latin texts. What a shame that so much knowledge and such linguistic skills have been lost since then!

In an article published in the BBC News Magazine,  Robert Fowler, Professor of Classics at the University of Bristol, was so kind as to compose a list of the main lost works from antiquity: 

Aeschylus - only 7 of his 80 plays survive

Aristophanes - 11 out of 40 plays survive

Ennius - his epic poem Annales, is almost entirely lost

Euripides - 18 of his 90 plays survive

Livy - three-quarters of his History of Rome is lost

Sappho - most of her nine books of lyric poems are lost

Sophocles - only 7 entire plays survive of the 120 he wrote

But returning to the Villa dei Papyri, we should be aware that the scrolls found so far lay in and around one room, but there are more rooms on the same level that have never been excavated, nor have the lower levels of the house been. Some of the scrolls discovered were packed in tubular boxes (capsae) used to carry them around, which could imply they came from another room or another part of the Villa. There is a theory that this Villa was not only a holiday residence but a mouseion, a place where the owner could show off his collections of works of art and literature.

New and more in-depth excavations in Herculaneum may answer many of the above questions. Still, the Italian authorities are not too keen to allow more digging as the archaeological site is located just underneath the modern town of Ercolano. This is an understandable argument, of course, but let us not forget that Mount Vesuvius is an ever-present menace, the last major eruption occurred in 1944, and the next one may bury the fragile remains of Herculaneum under an even deeper layer of ashes.

[Picture of the Getty Villa is from their site - click here]

Hellenica Oxyrhynchia by P.J. McKechnie and S.J. Kern

Repeated references in previous reading material (e.g. The History of Alexander the Great and the Ephemerides of Alexander’s Expedition by CA Robinson and Xenophon, The Persian Expedition) and the historical background of the papyri dump discovered at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, led me to pick up this book, Hellenica Oxyrhynchia with an introduction, translation and comments by P.J. McKechnie and S.J. Kern (ISBN 0-85668-358-2).

 

The authors have brought together the first publications by B.P. Grenfell and A.S. Hunt in 1908 with those made on later fragments. They are a collection of different copies of the same document written by the same unknown author.

The most recent fragments are kept at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and these are also the oldest papyri dating to the late first century AD. The so-called Florence Fragment was discovered in 1934 and is relatively small; it is kept at the Istituto Papirologico in the University of Florence and is dated to the late 2nd century AD. The principal papyrus is the one discovered by the above-mentioned British explorers in 1906, consisting at first of about 230 fragments that are dated to the late first or early second century AD. It is, however, possible that further portions of this Hellenica Oxyrhynchia will be discovered and identified in the future.

The fragments generally cover the history of Greece between 409 and 407 BC on one hand and 396 to 394 BC on the other. These papyri are a continuation of Thucydides’ history and pick up where Xenophon’s ‘Hellenica’ begins. A serious effort is made, thanks to the authors of this edition, to clarify the endless wars between Athens and Sparta about politics and power, combined with the warring and bribing of the Persians, who were experts in setting up one party against the other. The tale is fragmentary because the papyri are only fragments, but all the available Greek texts (reproduced on the left page) are given with a parallel translation in English (on the right-hand page); these texts are further commented upon in detail, including remarks and findings made in works of earlier authors.

The major question, i.e., the name of the author, remains unanswered. Pros and cons are being discussed, ranging from Xenophon, Theopompus, and Cratippus to Dionysus of Halicarnassus, Daimachus of Plataea, and Ephorus – to name only a few.

Captivating, highly interesting, and making you want to dig out the subject further.

More information about the papyri of Oxyrhynchus can be found in my previous story “Get involved with Oxyrhynchus” and in my comments on Peter Parsons’ book “City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish”.

Get involved with Oxyrhynchus

Roll up your sleeves! This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help archaeologists decipher the texts of ancient papyri from Oxyrhynchus, even if you have no training or if you can’t read any Greek.

[Oxyrhynchus papyrus, dated 75–125 AD.

It describes one of the oldest diagrams of Euclid's Elements.]

You may have heard of Oxyrhynchus for the first time when I commented on Peter Parsons’ book, City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish, Greek Papyri Beneath the Egyptian Sand Reveal a Long-Lost World. Oxyrhynchus made the headlines at the end of the 19^th century when Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt from Queen's College, Oxford, discovered a dumpsite outside today’s el-Bahnasa in Egypt where hundreds of thousands of papyri were uncovered. The precious finds have been blotted inside newspapers and piled up in metal boxes, still stored in the vaults of Oxford. Only a small percentage of this colossal amount of papyrus has been translated so far. Any help is more than welcome, for after translation, the texts still need to be matched to other existing texts or pieces of literature that are known but have not come down to us.

As it turns out, Chris Lintott, project manager of the Imaging Papyri Project, working together with papyrologists from Oxford University and the Egypt Exploration Society, has scanned these papyri and put them on a newly created website called Ancient Lives. Each visitor to this website will receive a picture of a papyrus fragment. His task will be to click a letter on the papyrus, followed by a click on the corresponding letter shown on the keyboard below. The purpose is to make each fragment just a little more “readable”. Later on, the experts will collect these bits and pieces and try to make sense of the texts.

So, if you are in for a challenge and some excitement, go to Ancient Lives and contribute to history by deciphering your own piece of papyrus! Don’t worry, you are not alone. Only two days after starting the project, volunteers have decoded and transcribed more than 100,000 characters already. Have fun doing something useful!

City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish by Peter Parsons

For those who are looking for something very different to read, this book, City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish, Greek Papyri Beneath the Egyptian Sand Reveal a Long-Lost World by Peter Parsons (ISBN 0753822334), definitely is the answer.

It is about the Greeks who settled in Egypt shortly after Alexander’s time, i.e., during the reign of the Ptolemies. They often occupied important hierarchic positions, as most of them could read and write, whereas for the Egyptians, these skills were limited to a select few scribes. The Egyptian hieroglyphs were, of course, a handicap as the average writer needed to know at least 10,000 signs by heart. In any case, the Greeks knew their business and introduced their alphabet, which very soon became the official language in Egypt (How proud Alexander the Great would have been had he witnessed this!)

We have to step back in time to 1897, when two young English archaeologists started digging through several sandy mounds outside the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus, a little south of today’s Cairo, discovering to their amazement that these old rubbish dumps contained precious bits and pieces of papyri, sometimes even entire sections of old books.

A small portion of about 10% turned out to be official documents, theater plays, poems, and other literature. The remaining parts are letters and notes from daily life that shed light on the organization and structure of the town. There are complaints about the water supply, the construction of new streets, or the building of houses, disputes with the administration, or neighbors’ quarrels, etc. And then to think that this is only the tip of the ice(sand)berg, since about 500,000 pieces are being kept at the British Museum, carefully stored inside old newspaper pages, locked away in metal boxes. Whenever such a box is opened for examination, nobody knows what to expect. The bits of papyrus have to be deciphered first, after which the experts need to find out in which context they'll eventually fit.

Most of these papyri date from the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, i.e., from Roman times, as the lower layers of rubbish have mostly been damaged by groundwater. The top layers, on the other hand, have been used by the local population over the centuries as fertilizer for their meager fields. This means that from time to time, the patient reader lays hands on excerpts from books whose existence is known but that have not come to us. I still have a secret hope that one day new information about Alexander the Great will surface from this rubble - from Ptolemaic times, for instance, it is a possibility, isn’t it? That would be a highly interesting discovery! The thought alone …

Yes, my imagination is giving me wings when I read a book like this. Such a source of information, and who knows what else we can learn when these personal letters, shopping lists, wills, fragments from Greek literature, and censored Gospels will be deciphered. This will evidently take several more years since there are only a handful of scholars who are familiar enough with ancient texts to be able to place them in their pertinent context.

Yet each chapter of this book makes exciting reading, like, for instance, the one about the dikes. By the time the flooding of the Nile was expected, all citizens had the obligation to repair and raise their portion of the dikes and to clear their section of irrigation canals. Official dike-watchers inspected the operations very closely, and you were not allowed to charge anyone money instead of doing the work or to subcontract the job. When the Romans ruled Egypt, the system was already in place for thousands of years, and it worked the same way till 1889! Well, I always thought that it was the Dutch who invented the water management with their dikes, requiring each landowner to clear their own stretch of canal! It is amazing to realize that the more I dig into ancient history (in the broadest possible way), the more I see the wheel is being reinvented over and over.

There definitely is enough reading material here to entice everybody’s imagination and to lift a small corner of the veil of time. The voices of the marketers come back to life, from the donkey-drivers to the wine-merchants in and around the once flourishing, bustling city of Oxyrhynchus.

Whoever wants more in-depth information about these exciting papyri of Oxyrhynchus can click on the link to the University of Oxford, Department of Papyrology.