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# At Egyptian Oxyrhynchus, the Hispano-Egyptian expedition of the University of Barcelona has concluded another season of excavation and returned with something genuinely strange
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/v-egipetskom-oksirinkhe-ispano-egipetskaia-ekspeditsiia-barselonskogo-universiteta-zavershila-ocherednoi-sezon-raskopok-i-vernulas-s-chem-to-po-nastoiashchemu-strannym/
- Published: 2026-04-21T06:05:59.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:26:16.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archaeology, The East, Books, Science

At Egyptian Oxyrhynchus, the Hispano-Egyptian expedition of the University of Barcelona has concluded another season of excavation and returned with something genuinely strange. Among the Roman-period mummies was one inside which lay a papyrus bearing a fragment of the second book of the *Iliad*, the famous "Catalogue of Ships", that interminable roll-call of Achaean flotillas with which Homer methodically torments every reader of the epic.

The haul as a whole is eloquent enough. Several mummies with golden tongues in their mouths, that is, amulets meant to secure the dead the gift of speech at the tribunal of Osiris. Cremation remains in vessels, which in Roman Egypt is a rarity in itself. A cat's skull. And inside one of the mummies, Homer.

Oxyrhynchus is a special place: it was here, at the end of the nineteenth century, that Grenfell and Hunt drew thousands of papyri from the rubbish heaps of the ancient city: fragments of Sappho, Menander, unknown gospels, administrative documents. But those were texts salvaged from refuse. A papyrus inside a mummy is another matter. It was placed there deliberately. Why precisely the "Catalogue of Ships", a section that ancient readers often skipped as tiresome, remains an open question. Perhaps it is a school text copied out by pupils. Perhaps it is something personal.

One way or another, it turns out that a man buried by the Egyptian rite with a golden tongue in his mouth kept a Greek epic about him. Two traditions of immortality, one ritual, the other literary, found themselves in a single grave.