They find the 'Iliad' on the abdomen of a mummy in Egypt

BarcelonaIt was not uncommon for Roman-era mummies to be buried with papyri. This has been confirmed by the Oxyrhynchus Archaeological Mission, from the Institute of Ancient Near Eastern Studies (IPOA) of the University of Barcelona, in the exhumations they have carried out in the Egyptian locality of El-Bahnasa, ancient Oxyrhynchus. "They placed the papyri in the chest and pelvic area, under the wrapping, folded and sealed with silt, and they contained magical texts written in Greek," explains Maite Mascort, who, with Esther Pons, directs the archaeological mission that began in 1992. For the first time, however, a fragment of a literary text has appeared, Homer's "Iliad". It is not that the deceased was a lover of texts that explain the pain and anger of some of the protagonists of the Trojan War, but rather that the papyrus was repurposed. "A manuscript of the "Iliad" was used to write the magical texts that used to accompany the deceased," assures Mascort.

After restoration, it has been possible to identify with considerable accuracy the fragment in question: it belongs to the catalogue of ships, from canto II of the "Iliad", the passage that enumerates the Greek forces against Troy. "It is not the first time we have found Greek papyri packed and sealed incorporated during the mummification process of a mummy, but until now they were mainly of magical content. On the other hand, it should be remembered that, since the end of the 19th century, an enormous quantity of papyri has appeared in Oxyrhynchus, including Greek literary texts of great importance, but the great novelty is finding a literary papyrus in a funerary context," assures the professor of the department of Classical, Romance, and Semitic Philology Ignasi-Xavier Adiego, a classical philologist and director of the Oxyrhynchus project.

More than a thousand tombs

The UB team has studied more than a thousand tombs in Oxyrhynchus over 34 years. It is a large necropolis spanning many centuries of history, from 700 BCE to 700 CE. There are tombs from the Saite, Greco-Roman, Christian, and Arab periods. Its ruins – about 190 km south of Cairo and on the left bank of the Bahr Yussef, an arm of the Nile that currently flows into the Fayoum oasis – also have a long history. They were discovered and identified by Vivant Denon, one of the French scholars who accompanied Napoleon Bonaparte on the Egyptian campaign (1799-1802). The first excavations were carried out in 1897 by the British Bernard P. Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt, attracted by the news of the large number of papyri found there. At that time, thousands were already taken, mostly written in Greek and dated from the Roman period, which are still studied today by the Egypt Exploration Society and are preserved in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

The tomb where the recycled Iliad has appeared is approximately 1,600 years old. It was discovered between November and December 2025 in tomb 65 of sector 22. "Many of these mummies also have a gold tongue. They would place this piece on top of the tongue, because gold is incorruptible, and thus protected it, facilitating that the deceased could later speak and deny having committed a series of sins during Osiris's judgment," details Mascort. "Many other papyri are still undergoing restoration and we cannot rule out that some other literary text may also appear," he adds. Most of the Roman-era tombs are of individuals who had a high status; they could be merchants, priests...