A papyrus fragment quoting Homer’s Iliad turned up sealed against the abdomen of a 1,600-year-old Egyptian mummy this past winter. Archaeologists call it the first Greek literary text ever found deliberately built into the mummification process itself. The passage is the Catalogue of Ships, Book II’s roll call of the Greek fleet bound for Troy, recovered from a looted Roman-era tomb near Al Bahnasa, the modern town built over ancient Oxyrhynchus in Egypt.
That “first ever” claim spread fast this spring. It has since run into a papyrologist who points to a strikingly similar burial from more than a century ago, and a second set of scholars who think the plainest explanation for why Homer ended up on a corpse has nothing to do with devotion at all.
A Fragment Surfaces in Tomb 65
During the campaign carried out between November and December 2025, Núria Castellano’s team discovered a Roman-era mummy in Tomb 65 of Sector 22 that featured an unusual element: a papyrus placed on the abdomen as part of the embalming ritual. The team had seen sealed packets like this before.
In previous campaigns, the Oxyrhynchus Archaeological Mission had already documented papyri written in Greek in similar positions, but all of them contained magical or ritualistic content. This one turned out to be different.
A second campaign, running January and February 2026, put the fragment in front of conservator Margalida Munar, papyrologist Leah Mascia and Ignasi-Xavier Adiego, a professor in the University of Barcelona’s Department of Classical, Romance and Semitic Languages who directs the Oxyrhynchus project. Based on Mascia’s reading, Adiego identified the text as belonging to the catalog of ships in Book II of Homer’s Iliad, the famous passage listing the Greek forces before Troy and one of the most iconic texts in Western literature.
The University of Barcelona announced the discovery in an April 20 news release. In the university’s statement identifying the papyrus as a funerary first, Adiego put it plainly: “This is not the first time we have found Greek papyri, bundled, sealed, and incorporated into the mummification process, but until now, their content was mainly magical.”
He added: “Since the late 19th century, a huge number of papyri have been discovered at Oxyrhynchus, including Greek literary texts of great importance. But the real novelty is finding a literary papyrus in a funerary context.”
The tomb itself showed hard use. The excavation revealed a funerary complex of three limestone chambers holding Roman-era mummies and decorated wooden sarcophagi, many in poor condition from past looting. Looters had broken the coffins and stripped the corpses of their most valuable belongings, though they left behind metal tongue amulets and gold leaf still stuck to the wrappings.
Is This the First Time Homer Was Buried With a Mummy?
The mission’s claim is specific: a literary papyrus deliberately built into an embalming process, for the first time on record. Coverage this spring often widened that into “the first Homer ever buried with a mummy,” a claim a Fayum burial from more than a century earlier already complicates.
Roberta Mazza, a papyrologist at the University of Bologna, noted in comments to Hyperallergic that there are other instances of Homer passages being buried with mummified persons, such as in the Egyptian Fayum, at the site of Hawara, where another section of Book II of the Iliad was found under the head of a female mummy in 1888. That papyrus is dated to the second century CE and is kept at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
The two finds do not line up in every detail. That is where a side-by-side helps.
| Detail | 2026 Oxyrhynchus Fragment | 1888 Hawara Fragment |
|---|---|---|
| Where found | Tomb 65, Sector 22, Al Bahnasa | Hawara necropolis, Fayum region |
| Placement on the body | Sealed on the abdomen | Placed beneath the head |
| Passage | Catalogue of Ships, Book II | Another section of Book II |
| Age of the papyrus | Roughly 1,600 years old | Dated to the second century CE |
| Where it is now | In conservation in Egypt | Bodleian Library, Oxford |
The overlap is real even with the differences: both fragments carry Book II of the Iliad, both came out of Egyptian burials, and both were sealed against a body rather than tossed nearby as waste.
Mazza’s sharper point was about how discovery stories get framed in the first place.
The necessity to publicize finds to attract economic support had a definite impact on the construction of discovery narratives.
Mazza wrote that in her own research on papyrological discoveries, according to Hyperallergic’s reporting on the find.
Two Explanations Compete for Why It Was There
The Oxyrhynchus team leans toward ritual. Adiego and his colleagues suspect the packaged papyrus represents a newly documented kind of “protective ritual practice” that offered something to the dead. Mascort and Pons described the earlier magical packets in similar terms.
“We believe they were elements related to the protection of the individual,” Mascort and Pons say. “Generally, these papyri are folded, tied and sealed.”
Homeric verse had a reputation for that kind of use. Joel Christensen studies the Iliad and Odyssey as provost of the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). “There was an apocryphal tradition of reciting Homer to heal animals and people,” he said.
Leah Mascia, the papyrologist who read the fragment, cautions against reading too much personal devotion into it. “The discovery of a copy of the Iliad in an Egyptian city like Oxyrhynchus is certainly not unusual,” she told Smithsonian Magazine. “In the Greco-Roman period, texts such as the Iliad circulated across all Egypt; they were used in educational settings, and copies were even owned by private citizens.”
A rival reading skips the ritual altogether. Stephan Blum and Stefan Baumann, writing in The Conversation, point to economics instead. The most straightforward explanation, they argue, is that discarded or damaged papyri were reused as inexpensive material, with this fragment simply functioning as stuffing, bundled up and pushed into the body cavity with no regard for its literary content.
Euronews reached a similar conclusion independently, suggesting the fragment was likely reused as part of the mummy’s wrappings or cartonnage, a common practice in antiquity where discarded texts were repurposed in burial preparation rather than placed for symbolic meaning.
One detail keeps the mystery open either way. The team did not report finding any other references to the Iliad, or to similar literary texts, in the site’s other mummies, which leaves open what the poem meant to this particular individual.
- Ignasi-Xavier Adiego and the Oxyrhynchus Mission read the sealed, bundled placement as a deliberate protective ritual, carried over from earlier magical papyri.
- Roberta Mazza of the University of Bologna says the “unprecedented” framing skips over the 1888 Hawara burial and reflects pressure to publicize new finds.
- Stephan Blum and Stefan Baumann, writing in The Conversation, argue the simplest explanation is that a damaged, cheap papyrus got recycled as body filler.
The research is ongoing. Archaeologists say further study may eventually clarify why this specific fragment ended up where it did.
The Team That Pulled It From the Sand
The Oxyrhynchus Archaeological Mission is not a new arrival at the site. Launched in 1992, the mission describes itself as one of the Spanish archaeological missions with the longest and most consistent track record in Egypt. Professor Josep Padró has led it from the start. Field direction on this campaign sat with Maite Mascort and Esther Pons, working through the university’s Institute of Ancient Near East Studies (IPOA).
Hassan Amer directed the excavation for the Egyptian side. He is a professor of archaeology at Cairo University’s Faculty of Archaeology, working in step with the Spanish team. Egypt’s Minister of Tourism and Antiquities, Sherif Fathy, received the preliminary report from the excavation directors and expressed satisfaction with results adding to the run of archaeological finds coming out of the Minya Governorate.
Fieldwork on this scale never runs on one budget. This campaign drew support from:
- Spain’s Ministry of Culture
- The University of Barcelona, home to the IPOA
- The Palarq Foundation
- The Catalan Egyptology Society
- AIXA Serveis Arqueològics
The mission also drew on cooperation from Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities and Cairo University.
Conservation on papyrus this fragile increasingly leans on imaging rather than touch. A Brigham Young University team showed what is possible two decades ago: in 2006 they traveled to Oxford to apply multispectral imaging to previously unreadable Oxyrhynchus fragments, the same kind of technology that had already worked on burned and heavily damaged texts elsewhere.
Oxyrhynchus Has Outproduced Every Other Site for a Century
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri were first excavated by two British archaeologists, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, between 1896 and 1907. They eventually unearthed the largest collection of papyri ever discovered, yielding roughly 500,000 papyri fragments, the vast majority of which represent singular texts.
Most of that haul is mundane paperwork. Ninety percent of the papyri are documentary, recording tax burdens, contracts and other daily affairs, while nearly 10 percent are literary and preserve classical and biblical texts. That literary tenth still adds up to an outsized share of everything that survives from antiquity: more than 70 percent of all literary papyri discovered anywhere come from Oxyrhynchus alone.
Homer keeps showing up across these collections. A library half a world away, at Johns Hopkins, holds its own fragments of the Iliad and the Odyssey pulled from the same site, rounded out by pieces of Demosthenes and Thucydides.
Egypt’s recent run of headline finds has not been limited to Oxyrhynchus either. Archaeologists elsewhere in the country recently uncovered a well-preserved fifth-century monastery, part of the same wave of digs reshaping how historians read Egypt’s Christian and classical past.
The Fragment’s Next Stop Is a Conservation Lab
The papyrus is not going on display yet. The material recovered from the tombs will undergo preventive conservation, laboratory analysis and photogrammetric documentation before curators settle on where it is stored long term.
Not every Egyptian mummy gets this level of handling. Archaeologists elsewhere have gone the opposite direction, choosing to leave a 2,300-year-old mummy fully wrapped rather than risk damaging remains that have stayed sealed for millennia.
The mission has not yet set dates for its next field season. For now, the papyrus sits sealed once more in a conservation lab in Egypt, waiting on tests that may say more about who it was buried with, and why.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is the Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad?
The Catalogue of Ships is the roll call in Book II of the Iliad, listing every contingent of Greek soldiers and the vessels that carried them to Troy. The passage recounts the Greek ships that came to fight at Troy after Helen, the queen of Sparta and a daughter of Zeus, was taken there by Paris, the son of the Trojan king. It is one of the most frequently copied sections of the poem to survive on papyrus.
How Common Are Homer Manuscripts in Egypt?
More than 1,500 papyri quoting Homer’s works survive today, but only an extremely small number were ever placed in burials. That scale reflects how central Homer was to Greek-language schooling across Roman Egypt, not any special status tied to this one fragment.
Who First Discovered Oxyrhynchus?
In 1798, Baron Vivant Denon, an artist traveling with Napoleon Bonaparte’s military expedition through Egypt, sketched a sand-blown column among the ruins, unintentionally producing the first modern record of Oxyrhynchus. Formal excavation waited almost a century. Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt began digging the site’s rubbish mounds in 1896. Some of what they found still sits far from Egypt: the Classical Museum applied for a set and purchased 29 papyri now catalogued in the university’s own papyrus collection records at the Spurlock Museum in Illinois.
What Other Artifacts Turned Up in the Same Tombs?
Excavators found more than the papyrus in Tomb 65’s neighboring chambers. Mummies nearby were adorned with golden tongue amulets, and the mission recovered terracotta and bronze statuettes, including a figure of the god Harpocrates shown as a horseback rider and a small statuette of Cupid, objects tied to Roman-era religious blending in the region.
Do We Know Who Was Buried With the Poem?
No. Excavation reports describe the Tomb 65 remains only as a Roman-era mummy, without publishing an age, sex or name. That is one more difference from the 1888 Hawara papyrus, which was recovered from a woman’s burial.
