In the ruins of the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus, in central Egypt, an international team of archaeologists has made an unprecedented discovery: a Roman-era mummy with a fragment of Homer’s Iliad placed on its abdomen.
It marks the first time in recorded history that a literary text has been found incorporated into an Egyptian funerary ritual.
The mummy, roughly 1,600 years old, was found at Al Bahnasa, a town about 125 miles south of Cairo. The team, which has been excavating the site for years, includes Ignasi-Xavier Adiego, a classical philologist at the University of Barcelona.
What makes the find extraordinary is neither the mummy’s age nor the text itself — but what they represent together.
Nearby sites had previously yielded mummies bearing sealed papyrus packets as part of funerary rites. But those papyri always contained religious formulas or funerary prayers — never a literary work.
“Until now, we didn’t know that literary texts could have been used as part of this funerary ritual,” Adiego said. “This is the real breakthrough for us.”
The fragment comes from the Catalogue of Ships—a passage in Book II of the Iliad in which Homer enumerates the Greek forces that set sail for Troy. It is not among the poem’s most dramatic passages, which only deepens the mystery.
An Unsolved Mystery
The papyrus is fragmented and poorly preserved, complicating its analysis. The team was able to identify the text with the naked eye; advanced techniques such as X-ray imaging could reveal additional details without damaging the fragile material.
For now, no one knows why that text was there.
One theory holds that the papyri found on other mummies may have functioned as a kind of embalmer’s signature. Another suggests they served a protective function. But a Homeric text fits neither explanation comfortably. As Adiego put it, the presence of a literary papyrus here is “much stranger” — something else entirely.
“At this point, we can’t explain why there is a literary papyrus here,” Adiego admitted.
But the papyrus was not the only remarkable find. The team uncovered three limestone tombs containing multiple mummies. Three of the mummies had gold sheets placed over the tongue; another had copper in the same position — a practice tied to the Greco-Roman custom of paying the ferryman Charon for safe passage to the underworld.
Two of the chambers also contained large jars of cremated human remains — one holding the ashes of one person, another of two — along with animal bones wrapped in cloth. One of those chambers also held an infant’s bones and the head of a cat.
Oxyrhynchus, the City That Never Stops Surprising
Oxyrhynchus holds a unique place in the history of classical archaeology. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, excavations at the site yielded tens of thousands of papyrus fragments, helping to recover lost texts of the ancient world—from the poems of Sappho to apocryphal gospels.
More than a century later, the site continues to yield discoveries of this magnitude — a testament to how much still lies beneath the sand. The team from the University of Barcelona will continue analyzing the papyrus using advanced imaging techniques.
Maybe then the mummy will finally reveal who decided—and why—to send Homer along to the afterlife.
