Imagine that, 1,500 years from today, an archaeologist finds the remnants of your garbage in a dump. They might find your shopping lists, receipts, insurance contracts, bank statements, your will, personal letters to family and friends, and maybe even pages from a journal therapy course. Perhaps they might find religious or spiritual writings, a few old newspapers, and a few torn pages from your favourite thriller or romance novels.It's always good to come back to the story of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. This article focuses on some of the quite interesting non-literary texts.Such a scenario should give you a flavour of what Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt found in their excavation of a site at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt between 1896 and 1907. Here, within a city rubbish dump, the archaeologists found a seemingly inexhaustible trove of papyrus documents dating to the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods that have revolutionised our understanding of late-ancient Hellenic Egyptian society and culture.
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