Archaeologists in Egypt have found something they had never seen before: a mummy with a passage from Homer’s Iliad stuck to its abdomen. According to CNN’s account of the discovery, the roughly 1,600-year-old mummy was unearthed at the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus, and the fragment of papyrus on it comes from Book II of the Greek epic — the first time a literary text, rather than a ritual document, has turned up as part of an Egyptian embalming.
Why a line of Homer changes the picture
The find is significant precisely because of what it is not. Other mummies at the site have been found with sealed packages of papyri bearing what appear to be ritualistic formulas, placed on the body as part of the funerary process. Those made sense within the known logic of Egyptian burial. A passage of secular literature does not. “Until now, we didn’t know that they would have used literary texts as part of this funerary ritual,” said Ignasi-Xavier Adiego, a classical philologist at the University of Barcelona who is part of the team working at the site, calling it “the big development for us.”
The specific passage adds to the intrigue. The team has determined the text comes from the catalogue of ships in Book II of the Iliad — the long, list-like section enumerating the Greek contingents sailing to Troy. Why that portion of Homer, and why it was attached to a body during embalming, is not something the researchers can yet explain. Adiego said one possibility is that the papyrus served as a kind of signature of the embalmer, though he stressed the interpretation of a literary text filling that role is “much stranger” than the theory that ritual instructions had a protective function.
What the researchers actually know so far
Caution runs through the team’s own description of the work, and it is worth mirroring rather than smoothing over. The mummy was found in the modern town of Al Bahnasa, about 200 kilometers (124 miles) south of Cairo, at a site that was part of the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus, and it dates to roughly 1,600 years ago, placing it in the Roman era, according to a statement from the University of Barcelona. Those are the firm facts.
The papyrus itself is fragmented and in poor condition, which limits how much can be read. “We haven’t had the opportunity to study it using high-tech methods such as X-rays, which might allow us to read it better,” Adiego said, adding that the team has “done all we can without destroying the papyrus.” In other words, the research is at a preliminary stage, and important questions — including the papyrus’s exact role in the embalming process — remain open. Little is also known about the person who was mummified, beyond the inference that their family had enough wealth to pay for embalming.
The broader excavation produced more than the single mummy. Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said the dig uncovered three limestone tombs containing several mummies, three of which had gold foil on their tongues and another with copper on its tongue — a practice tied to beliefs about the afterlife. The ministry also described jars holding burned human remains alongside the bones of an infant and the head of a feline animal in one room, and the burned remains of two people with an animal’s bones in another, all wrapped in fabric.
What it means and what remains to be answered
For the study of Greco-Roman Egypt, the value of the find is that it widens the known repertoire of funerary practice. If literary papyri could accompany the dead, then the boundary between everyday text and ritual object was more porous than scholars assumed, and it invites a rereading of other papyrus fragments recovered from similar burials. Oxyrhynchus is already famous among classicists as a source of ancient texts pulled from its rubbish heaps; a Homeric line used in an actual burial is a different category of evidence.
The next steps are technical and deliberate. Non-destructive imaging, such as advanced X-ray or multispectral techniques, could let researchers read more of the fragment without dismantling it, potentially clarifying how much of the catalogue of ships was present and how the papyrus was positioned. Comparative work with the ritual papyri found on other mummies at the site may help settle whether the Homeric text was an embalmer’s mark, a protective charm, or something not yet imagined.
For now, the honest summary is that the discovery raises more questions than it answers. The team has established what the text is and where and when the mummy comes from, but not why a line of Homer ended up on a dead person’s stomach in Roman-era Egypt. That gap is the point: it is a genuinely new kind of find, and the interpretation will have to catch up with the object.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
