City of the Sharp-nosed Fish Greek Papyri Beneath the Egyptian Sand Reveal a Long-lost World

by P. J. Parsons

In 1897 two Oxford archaeologists began digging a series of low sand-covered mounds a hundred miles south of Cairo, on a side-branch of the Nile. They turned out to be the rubbish-dumps of an administrative centre and thriving city at the time of the Roman Empire - Oxyrhynchos ('City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish') - inhabited by descendants of the Greek immigrants who had colonized Egypt after Alexander the Great's conquest in 332 BC. When Grenfell and Hunt finally finished ten years later, they had uncovered, amidst the rubbish, 500,000 fragments of papyri, a unique treasure-trove of original books and documents, in which lost masterpieces of Greek literature not seen by human eyes since the fall of Rome, and fragments of censored Christian Gospels. What the excavators had found was the entire life and culture of a flourishing market-town, encapsulated in its waste paper.

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