Archaeologists in the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus recently announced that they’d found a 1,600-year-old papyrus fragment bearing a passage from Homer’s Iliad inside of a mummy’s abdomen. The discovery raises a number of questions, most notably: Why, pray tell, was this literary papyrus placed inside the tummy of a mummy?
That’s where the expertise of LSA professor Ian Moyer from the Departments of Anthropology and History comes in. Moyer contextualized the details of the news story with his knowledge of the Roman Empire, Egyptian funerary practices, and Classical literature—bringing to life the world that this mummy once inhabited.
“This discovery was indeed an unusual find,” Moyer says, “but some specialists in papyrology have already pointed out that, despite what the excavators announced, it is not really the first time that a text of the Iliad was found intentionally buried with a mummy.” Still, as he goes on to explain, this recent discovery is a fascinating one.
Discerning readers know that news stories often appear more “sensational” than they would under closer examination. That is exactly why we seek out experts: to cut through the click bait, to provide nuance, detail, and researched facts, and to explain what discoveries like this mean and why they matter.
LSA: A 1,600-year-old papyrus on which a passage from Homer’s Iliad is written was recently found in a mummy’s abdomen. Why was it put there?
Ian Moyer: I’ll offer a correction to some of the stories circulating that reported that the text was found in the tummy of the mummy. Apparently, the text was actually found within the mummy’s wrappings, but on top of its abdomen. It was probably on rather than in its tummy, and my gut instinct is that it was an amulet of some kind.
I’ll also point to this blog post by Sarah Bond, a well-respected ancient historian. She cites a papyrologist [Roberta Mazza], who notes that another discovery like this, even of the same book of the Iliad, was already made in the late 19th century.
LSA: Got it—not in the tummy, but on it. But why would a mummy be buried with a work of literature in the first place? Was this guy a real bookworm, or did everyone get reading material to take to the afterlife?
IM: The placement of the text on the body within outer wrappings (but not in the body) is important since this was how amulets protecting the body of the deceased were placed in Egyptian funerary practice. It could be that the text was placed there for some kind of ritual purpose, although why a text of the Iliad, let alone Book 2 of the Iliad, was put there is a bit of a mystery. There are a couple of possibilities.
There is a lot of evidence of various verses of the Iliad and the Odyssey being used for ritual purposes, including divination, healing, protection, or erotic magic. In some cases, the verse was spoken as an incantation, but in others a verse was written or inscribed on some material, and worn as an amulet. It could be that this was the function of this bit of verse. Usually, however, there is some ritual logic—some analogy that connects the sense of the verse to the ritual goal. It’s a little hard to imagine how verses from the “Catalogue of Ships” [the section of Book 2 reported to have been discovered] would be used—but there are other strange examples in the use of Homeric verses, so who knows?
The other thing to bear in mind is that Book 2 of the Iliad, including the “Catalogue of Ships,” is the most commonly found among the papyri for some reason—maybe because it is a kind of gazetteer of legendary Greek geography. So it could also just be chance that this text was used. Perhaps the very fragmentary remains of the Iliad found on the mummy were part of a papyrus that was reused for some other purpose, which was common, and we just don’t have the text that was on the other side. Maybe the Homer text was just put there because it represented the power of writing.
If the text was intended as material for reading rather than magic—which is possible, I suppose—it would not be surprising. Homer was really popular, since it was the basis of Greek education everywhere, including ancient Egypt. But if the fragments are as small as the reports suggest, the material wouldn’t entertain our deceased individual for very long, so I’m going with a ritual function.
LSA: As you mentioned, the literary work found with the mummy is from the Iliad, an ancient Greek epic poem written by Homer. What might this Greek text have meant to an Egyptian citizen? Can you share a brief timeline of cultural influence and governance?
IM: At the time when this mummy was buried, Egypt had been part of the Roman Empire for almost 400 years, and for 300 years before that, Egypt had been ruled by the Ptolemaic Dynasty, which had brought Greek immigrants, their language, and their culture to Egypt. So Egypt had been a multicultural and multilingual place for a very long time. We can’t be sure if this individual considered himself Greek, Roman, Egyptian, some other ethnicity, or some combination of identities. If this was a literary text that the deceased had read in life and wanted to have on hand for the afterlife, it’s definitely a testament to the enduring esteem in which Homer’s poetry was held by many residents of Egypt at this time. And even if this text was intended as an amulet, it clearly had value of another kind as well.
LSA: What was the passage from Homer’s epic poem about?
IM: The “Catalogue of Ships” is a long and, to most modern sensibilities, kind of boring list of all the leaders who came along with Agamemnon on his little excursion to get Helen back from Troy, where they were from, and the number of ships full of men they brought. There are lots of copies of it among the Greek papyri. Homer’s epics have had an enduring appeal among many audiences for about 2,800 years—right up to the present.
LSA: How were archaeologists able to read the papyrus fragment? What kinds of tools were used in the process of retrieving and reading it?
IM: The papyrus was pretty fragmentary, to judge by the photos I’ve seen, but there are letters visible on those bits and pieces. Figuring out what they spelled out was, like it often is in papyrology, probably a bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing and no box-top picture to consult. Once the words are figured out, the vocabulary would make it clear that it was poetry, and either you recognize it or you search around in textual databases until you match it up with a text. In the case of Homer this is not too difficult, since his language is so well known and distinctive.
Photos by University of Barcelona/Professor Ignasi-Xavier Adiego (top). Macmillan (bottom)
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