A Roman-era Egyptian Mummy has been found laid to rest with a fabled Greek text. Homer’s Iliad was discovered in a clay packet outside the wrappings of a 2,000-year-old mummy in the Oxyrhynchus necropolis, which may have been used to help guide the dead through the afterlife. The papyrus relic was located by a team from the University of Barcelona’s Oxyrhynchus Archaeological Mission, led by Ignasi-Xavier Adiego, and is thought specifically to be from Book 2’s “Catalog of Ships” of the 24-book epic poem. The team spent six years piecing together, stabilizing, and translating the papyrus until they could finally decode its contents. “The find is incredibly significant, primarily for the discovery of such a papyrus with Greek literary text in its original context,” University of Chicago Egyptologist Foy Scalf told The New York Times. “We have evidence that such Greek literary texts could be used as magical amulets and that Homer was frequently cited in such amulets, as well as in the large handbooks now known as ‘The Greco-Egyptian Formularies.’ The new find directly supports that indirect knowledge.”
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