More on the Egyptian mummy's Iliad excerpt

OXYRHYNCHUS WATCH: The mummy, the Iliad, and a mysterious death ritual. Archaeologists in Egypt unearthed a sealed packet of the epic poem resting atop a Roman-era mummy, suggesting they may have been used as a magical ward for the afterlife (Taylor Mitchell Brown, National Geographic).

[Professor Serena Perone] agrees that ritualistic use is one possible interpretation.

“Several literary sources mention incantations utilizing Homeric verses for protective or healing purposes,” she says. But in those instances, the texts cited specific lines, not “extensive passages” like an excerpt from the Catalogue of Ships as found atop the Oxyrhynchus mummy.

That sounds about right. One Greco-Egyptian incantation (PGM VII.1-148) consists just of a long list of unconnected lines from Homer. It calls itself "the Homer oracle."And there are other examples using just one or a few lines; notably PGM IV.2145-2240, which quotes three Homeric lines with instructions for using them as a spell inscribed on an iron lamella.

That said, an extended passage from the Catalogue of Ships does not seem like a good candidate for a ritual incantation. But the passage was excerpted and buried with the deceased for some reason. I suspect that our imagination is what is limiting us here. If we do find the reason, it will seem obvious in hindsight.

Background here.

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Homer at Oxyrhyncus?

OXYRHYNCHUS WATCH: Archaeological mission in Oxyrhynchus has found Homer's 'Iliad' inside a Roman-era mummy (PhysOrg/University of Barcelona, edited by Stephanie Baum, reviewed by Robert Egan).

During the campaign carried out between November and December 2025, Núria Castellano's team discovered a Roman-era mummy in Tomb 65 of Sector 22 that featured an unusual element: a papyrus placed on the abdomen as part of the embalming ritual. In previous campaigns, the Oxyrhynchus Archaeological Mission had already documented papyri written in Greek in similar positions, but all contained magical or ritualistic content. A literary text such as the "Iliad" had never before been found in this context.

The text is from the Catalogue of Ships in Iliad book II.

For a recent overview of the Oxyrhynchus papyri, see here. There are endless PaleoJudaica post on the site and the papyri in the archives.

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Poppaea's house at Pompeii?

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: The Home of Nero’s Wife at Pompeii. Renewed excavations at the Villa of Poppaea (Nathan Steinmeyer).

Renewed excavations near Pompeii are revealing more of the incredible riches of a house believed to be the home of Emperor Nero’s second wife, Poppaea. In addition to newly excavated rooms, archaeologists have uncovered multiple stunning frescoes and other remarkable finds.

[...]

PaleoJudaica last saw Poppaea Sabina ascending to heaven on a chariot. Or at least that seems the most likely reading of a damaged third-century Oxyrhynchus papyrus that doesn't actually give her name.

I posted that story with an eye to a revisionist view of Nero. (For another Nero story that does not fit the narrative, see here.) But Poppaea's mythology aside, it seems that her likely second home, at Pompeii, is currently being excavated. If so, we now know quite a few personal details about her, including her tastes in decorating and gardening.

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Mapping the Jews of Ancient Egypt

ONLINE EVENT: Mapping the Jews of Ancient Egypt (By Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society)

About this event

Mapping the Jews of Ancient Egypt: From the Hellenistic Period to the Arab Conquest

This paper presents IM–JEDI, an interactive map of the Jews of Egypt based on documentary (papyri) and epigraphic evidence, tracing Jewish settlement and migration from the Ptolemaic through the Byzantine periods. By visualizing geographical shifts, continuity, and disappearance of communities, the project highlights urban and rural distribution, the impact of the Diaspora Revolt (115–117 CE), and the transformation of Egyptian Jewry in its aftermath. Case studies from the Fayum, Antinoopolis, Oxyrhynchus, and Upper Egypt (Edfu) illustrate patterns of resilience, decline, and cultural adaptation. The map demonstrates how digital tools can illuminate Jewish history in Egypt across centuries of political and social change.

Meron M. Piotrkowski (Ph.D., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2015) is Associate Professor of Ancient Jewish History at the University of Oxford. A historian of antiquity, he specializes in the Second Temple period with a particular focus on the Jewish Diaspora in Egypt. He is the author of Priests in Exile: The History of the Temple of Onias and Its Community in the Hellenistic Period (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2019) and a contributor to the new Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum (vols. IV–VII, eds. N. Hacham and T. Ilan). His current book project focuses on the History of the Jewish community of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt during the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods.

This free lecture takes place on Wednesday, October 22 · 5 - 6:30pm GMT+1. Follow the link for ticket information. It says there are few tickets left, which surprises me for an online event. But don't dawdle!

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On the Oxyrhynchus Papyri

OXYRHYNCHUS WATCH: The Oxyrhynchus Papyri: From ancient trash to historical treasure. What can the famous papyrus corpus tell us about the ordinary people of late-ancient Egypt? Richard J Britton investigate (The Past).

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.

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.

[...]

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.

For a great many PaleoJudaica posts on the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, run "Oxyrhynchus" through the search engine.

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Greek Matthew and 6 Ezra fragments from Oxyrhynchus

VARIANT READINGS: New Article on P.Oxy. 1 2 and P.Oxy. 7 1010 (Brent Nongbri).

Behind the bland title of Brent's post lies a very interesting article on two long-known manuscripts that deserve more attention:

AnneMarie [Luijendijk] and I gave a general overview of Christian codices among the Oxyrhynchus papyri and then focused on two pieces, P.Oxy. 1 2, a papyrus bifolium containing the beginning of the Gospel According to Matthew in Greek and P.Oxy. 7 1010, a parchment leaf from a codex containing 6 Ezra.

The Matthew papyrus is dated to the third century and is of interest to New Testament scholars.

The second manuscript is of particular interest to PaleoJudaica. The full text of 6 Ezra is known only in a Latin translation appended to the Latin version of 4 Ezra. This Latin combination of 4-5-6 Ezra is known as 2 Esdras. This small, late-antique parchment fragment preserves the little that we have of the Greek original of 6 Ezra.

This open-access article gives background on Christian papyri from Oxyrhynchus. It discusses the details of this manuscript and explores the question of its provenance (Jewish or Christian). The authors also argue that the manuscript was a stand-alone one containing only 6 Ezra. This is an important datum for questions about the text's origin, transmission, and attachment to 4-5 Ezra. The article also points to an intriguing reference to a copy of an Ezra book–conceivably this very manuscript—in a fourth-century personal letter, also discovered at Oxyrhynchus.

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Pylon - open-access journal online

THE AWOL BLOG: Open Access Journal: Pylon. Editions and Studies of Ancient Texts.

Volume 5 (2024) publishes, inter alia, an inscribed stele from Berenike, a Homeric fragment from Oxyrhynchus, a second-century CE ostracon from Elephantine, and a mathematical inscribed wax tablet in the Chester Beatty Library.

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National Lottery grant for the Egyptian Exploration Society

OXYRHYNCHUS WATCH: National Lottery grant boosts plan to exhibit Oxyrhynchus Papyri in London (Ian Mansfield, IanVisits).

The London-based Egypt Exploration Society has been awarded a grant that could see a redevelopment of their headquarters and the internationally significant Oxyrhynchus Papyri displayed in London for the first time. ...

They are planning to submit a bid for a full National Lottery delivery grant, which will secure up to two-thirds of the project’s cost. Ahead of that, the National Lottery Heritage Fund has granted them an initial £61,321 which will go towards the cost of producing the full bid documents. ...

Congratulations to the EES on the initial grant and good luck with the full grant application.

I am glad the EES is benefitting from it ... but don't play the lottery.

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The Exagoge of Ezekiel is playing in New York

THEATRE: Exagoge Review. The oldest Jewish play, PLUS (Jonathan Mandell, New York Theater).

“Exagoge,” inspired by the oldest known Jewish play, is a wildly ambitious, complicated but largely accessible new work of immersive theater: a play, opera, and Passover seder all in one – and all in just 100 minutes, which (if you know seders) is itself an achievement. There is much else besides its comparative brevity to recommend this latest work by the reliably erudite Edward Einhorn and his Untitled Theater Company No. 61., which began at La MaMa in the middle of Passover and is running through May 12 (two weeks past the holiday.) The play, which is thought-provoking in itself, provides a modern frame both for the opera, which has moments of exquisite singing and vivid stagecraft, and for the seder, which is more or less for real, and fun, if unorthodox (thus, for some, possibly problematic.)

A Jewish dramatist named Ezekiel the Tragedian wrote the original “Exagoge” some 2,200 years ago in Alexandria, Egypt. Although only a fragment of Ezekial’s play remains (269 lines), that’s plenty enough for scholars to know it was a drama written in Greek about the exodus of the Jews from Egyptian bondage, influenced by the tragedies written several centuries earlier by Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles. It retells the story from the Exodus book of the Bible, but incorporates non-Biblical elements, such as a phoenix that rises up at the end – which some (such as Einhorn) speculate was Ezekiel’s effort (as Einhorn puts it in a note) “to reach out to the pagan community. We know that, historically, the Jews of Alexandria were surprisingly integrated into Alexandrian society” (which at the time was what we would now call multicultural.)

[...]

Another adaptation of Ezekiel's Exagoge was performed in 2016. I noted it here and links. The outside links have rotted or were glitched, but you can now read the missing review of it by Rabbi John Rosove here.

A new Oxyrhynchus fragment of the Exagoge was also discovered in 2016, noted here and here. Presumably that was too late to be taken into account by the 2016 production. I don't know about the current one.

For more posts on the Exagoge, follow the links in the ones above. Cross-file under Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Watch.

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On the new noncanonical gospel fragments from Oxyrhynchus

NEW TESTAMENT APOCRYPHA WATCH: Early Christianity, fragment by fragment. A new published volume of ancient papyri contains sayings, attributed to Jesus, that were previously unknown—including a dialogue with a disciple named Mary ( Elizabeth Schrader Polczer, The Christian Century).

Last summer brought big news for scholars of early Christianity. Three previously unknown gospel fragments were published for the first time as part of an ongoing series, The Oxyrhynchus Papyri. These three Greek manuscript fragments, which scholars date between the second to the fourth centuries CE, all purport to preserve otherwise unknown sayings of Jesus.

[...]

This article gives a good introduction to the Oxyrhynchus papyri and an excellent overview of these three noncanoncial gospel texts.

For PaleoJudaica posts on the new Jesus sayings fragment P.Oxy. 87.5575 (a.k.a. P.Oxy. 5575), see the links collected here.

Cross-file under Oxyrhynchus Watch.

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Review of Smith & Landau, The Secret Gospel of Mark

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Controversial Scholar, a Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate Over Its Authenticity (Andrew S. Jacobs).

Geoffrey S. Smith and Brent C. Landau. The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Controversial Scholar, a Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate Over Its Authenticity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023.

... This is an excellent book, written with verve and wit, technical without being arcane, and accessible without shortcuts or shoddiness. Readers will learn a great deal from G. Smith and Landau about paleography, apocrypha, monasticism, the history of sexuality, and the strange academic environments in which all of these are explored: filled with curiosity, envy, ambition, and flashes of brilliance. It will find a place on professors’ library shelves, graduate student reading lists, undergraduate syllabi, and bedside tables of readers far outside our arcane scholarly worlds. ...

This review also amounts to a useful summary of the history of scholarship on the so-called Secret Mark manuscript since its publication.

One unspoken takeaway is that everyone now seems to have abandoned the possibility that the Secret Mark quotations could come from an actual first-century version of the Gospel of Mark. But perhaps that is what the review's hypothetical "ingenuous undergraduate right now encountering Secret Mark for the first time" will be arguing in thirty year's time.

Be that as it may, after this much discussion I don't think we are ever going to settle the vexed question of whether that odd manuscript is an excerpt from a genuine work of Clement, a late antique forgery, or a modern forgery. Unless Oxyrhynchus or some other manuscript cache produces some portion of an ancient copy of it.

UPDATE (AND NUANCE) (24 June 2026): It seems that the genuiness of Secret Mark may still be live option.

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2023: A big year for Egyptian archaeology

YEAR-END RETROSPECTIVE: 2023 Yearender: A year of heritage (Nevine El-Aref, ahramonline).

Enhancing the tourist experience, digitising the services provided at archaeological sites and museums, exploring and conserving Egypt’s heritage, and opening new cultural attractions all took place this year, writes Nevine El-Aref

PaleoJudaica noted many of the discoveries and developments mentioned in the article. These include the new Egyptian Book of the Dead manuscripts; the reopening of Alexandria's Greco-Roman Museum; the new chamber in the Great Pyramid; the Saqqara embalming workshops; and the reopening of the Ben Ezra synagogue.

PaleoJudaica also posted on a couple of Egyptian discoveries not mentioned in the article: the Buddha statue at Berenike and the tombs excavated at Oxyrhynchus.

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Did the P.Oxy. 5575 scribe also copy (something like) the Gospel of Peter?

VARIANT READINGS: P.Oxy. 87.5575 and P.Oxy. 60.4009: The Same Copyist (Brent Nongbri).

P.Oxy. 60.4009 is described as "Gospel of Peter (?)." See, for example, Appendix 3 of this 2004 SBL paper by Bob Kraft.

For the new Jesus sayings fragment, P.Oxy. 87.5575 (a.k.a. P.Oxy. 5575). see here, here, and here.

By the way, over at the AWOL Blog, Chuck Jones has recently linked to the Oxford/EES Oxyrhynchus Papyri website. This seems like a good time to mention it.

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Is that new Oxyrhynchus fragment Q?

SPOLIER: NOPE. NT Pod 102: Has Q Been Discovered? Mark Goodacre has an excellect podcast on the new Jesus sayings fragment P.Oxy. 5575.

Background here.

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Fragment of an early collection of Jesus sayings?

(NEW) NEW TESTAMENT APOCRYPHA WATCH? Over at the ETC Blog, Peter Gurry notes a newly published fragment of a manuscript from Oxyrhynchus which contains Jesus sayings known from Matthew, the Gospel of Thomas, and maybe Luke. The editors date it to the second century CE, which is quite early for any kind of gospel manuscript.

New 2nd-Century ‘Sayings of Jesus’ Oxyrhynchus Papyrus

Synopsis of P.Oxy. 5575, Matt, Luke, and Thomas

Brent Nongbri has an evaluation of the paleographic case for a second-century date over at Variant Readings: The Date of the New Oxyrhynchus Sayings of Jesus P.Oxy. 87.5575.

I tend to agree with the editors about the similarity of the scripts of 5575 and 4009, but in my first look at the proposals for dated parallels (for both the pieces), I cannot say that I find any of them especially compelling. This is not to criticize the work of the editors. It is very difficult to find good, securely dated comparanda for scripts like these. A more detailed evaluation will have to wait for another occasion.

A lot of questions remain about this new text. Is it a sayings gospel based on oral traditions? Is it a compilation of sayings extracted from earlier gospels? Is it some other kind of work that just happens to cite some Jesus sayings in what survives? And how secure is that second century date?

I imagine all of these questions will be debated for a long time to come. In any case, P.Oxy. 5575 is an important discovery.

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Tombs excavated at Oxyrhynchus

OXYRHYNCHUS WATCH: Group Of Persian, Roman and Coptic Tombs Discovered In Egypt (Paula Tsoni, Greek Reporter).

The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced on Friday the discovery of a group of tombs from the Persian, Roman and Coptic eras in the Al-Bhansa region, Minya governorate.

[...]

Most of the media coverage does not realize that Al-Bhansa is also Oxyrhychus, the place where a gigantic trove of inscribe papyri was recovered in trash dumps over a century ago. The papyri are still being deciphered and edited.

There is no indication that the current excavation found any papyri. But there is a report of murals inscribed in Greek and Coptic at the site.

For many PaleoJudaica posts on Oxyrhynchus and its papyri, start here and follow the links.

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More images of Oxyrhynchus papyri at the Bodleian

VARIANT READINGS: More Digital Images of Papyri at the Bodleian Online (Brent Nongbri). Including Greek fragments from Oxyrhynchus of the Gospel of Thomas and the Book of Psalms.

Background here and here.

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The Oxford Oxyrhynchus papyri online

THE AWOL BLOG: The Oxyrhynchus Papyri Database.

This database presents digitised images of the published papyri belonging to the Egypt Exploration Society and housed in the Sackler Library at Oxford. The collection comprises thousands of texts on papyrus and parchment and is the largest of its kind in the world. It includes principally literary, documentary, and other texts in Greek, dating from the second century BCE to the seventh century CE; other languages represented include Latin, Demotic, and Coptic. Most of the papyri come from excavations conducted at the site of Oxyrhynchus (modern Behnesa) by Oxford classicists Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt in 1896–1907 on behalf of the Egypt Exploration Fund (now Society). Since then, scholars have worked continuously to catalogue, decipher, and publish this material.

The site of the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus is best known for its trove of many thousands of ancient papyri found in a trash dump. For many posts on it and them, start here and just follow those links. For the missing Oxyrhynchus papyri scandal, see here and links. Cross-file under Oxyrhynchus Watch.

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CT on Obbink and the missing Oxford papyri

CHRISTIANITY TODAY: Missing Papyri Professor Must Return $7 Million to Hobby Lobby. Dirk Obbink has lost a federal lawsuit over the fraudulent sale of Gospel fragments. (Gordon Govier). HT Brent Nongbri.

Obbink was arrested in 2020 and then sued in 2021. Shortly after that, court records show, he moved to a houseboat named the James Brindley and started hiding from the private investigators attempting to serve him summons.

For PaleoJudaica posts tracking the missing-Oxyrhynchus-papyri scandal, start here and follow the links. This story does not seem to be getting any less strange.

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More golden tongues, but still no Cleopatra's tomb

EGYTPIAN ARCHAEOLGY: Meet the lawyer-turned-archaeologist leading the search for Cleopatra's tomb. Kathleen Martinez has risked everything in her quest to find Egyptian queen's resting place, she tells 'The National' (Hamza Hendawi, The National).

This article gives a good brief account of Ms. Martinez's background and her archaeological work at Taposiris Magna. But one has to read far along to learn that the only new announcement is that there might be a new announcement soon:

But now, the end may be in sight.

“Sometimes I feel like I would like to update the people on what I am doing,” she said, explaining that only Egyptian authorities, not the relevant archaeologists, announce new discoveries.

“They may announce by the end of this year, that I am now closer to my objective,” she said cryptically.

“It is very improbable that I won’t discover the tomb,” she said, striking a confident note as she sipped a glass of lemonade at the lounge of a Nile-side Cairo hotel.

I hope she's right.

For more on Cleopatra VII (THE Cleopatra) see here and links. Plutarch reports that she knew Hebrew and Aramaic.

For the excavation at Taposiris Magna and the hope that it will lead to the tomb of Cleopatra, start here and follow the links. That link is about the discovery of two mummies there which were equipped with golden tongues. That leads to the other part of my header above. Two more golden tongued mummies have just been discovered, this time at at Oxyrhynchus:

Golden tongues found in mouths of ancient Egyptian couple. Tombs of man and woman dating back 2,500 years found at Oxyrhynchus; male mummy’s sarcophagus still sealed with hundreds of funerary items inside (Times of Israel).

The article also reports that three more golden tongues were recovered "outside the tombs," whatever that means.

The site of the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus is best known for its trove of many thousands of ancient papyri found in a trash dump. For many posts on it and them, start here (plus here) and just keep following those links. For the missing Oxyrhynchus papyri scandal, see here and links. Cross-file under Oxyrhynchus Watch.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.