The city of the sharp-nosed fish : Greek lives in Roman Egypt

In 1897 two Oxford archaeologists began digging in a sand-covered mound 100 miles south of Cairo. When they finished ten years later, they had uncovered 500,000 fragments of papyri from the ruins of the city of Oxyrhynchus. The work of deciphering these fragments is still ongoing. In 1897 two Oxford archaeologists began digging a low sand-covered mound a hundred miles south of Cairo. When they had finally finished, ten years later, they had uncovered 500,000 fragments of papyri. Shipped back to Oxford, the meticulous and scholarly work of deciphering these fragments began. It is still going on today. As well as Christian writings from totally unknown gospels and Greek poems not seen by human eyes since the fall of Rome, there are tax returns, petitions, private letters, sales documents, leases, wills and shopping lists. What they found was the entire life of a flourishing market-town - Oxyrhynchos (the city of the sharp-nosed fish'), on a side branch of the Nile - encapsulated in its waste paper. The total lack of rain in this part of Egypt had preserved the papyrus beneath the sand, as nowhere else in the Roman Empire. We hear the voices of barbers, bee-keepers and boat-makers, dyers and donkey-drivers, plasterers and poets, weavers and wine-merchants, set against the great events of late antiquity: the rise and fall of the Roman Empire and the coming of Christianity, as well as the all-important annual flooding of the Nile. The result is an extraordinary and unique picture of everyday life in the Nile Valley between Alexander the Great in 300 BC and the Arab conquest a thousand years later In 1897 two Oxford archaeologists began digging a series of low sand-covered mounds a hundred miles south of Cairo, on a side-branch of the Nile. They turned out to be the rubbish-dumps of an administrative centre and thriving city at the time of the Roman Empire - Oxyrhynchos ('City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish') - inhabited by descendants of the Greek immigrants who had colonized Egypt after Alexander the Great's conquest in 332 BC. When Grenfell and Hunt finally finished ten years later, they had uncovered, amidst the rubbish, 500,000 fragments of papyri, a unique treasure-trove of original books and documents, in which lost masterpieces of Greek literature not seen by human eyes since the fall of Rome, and fragments of censored Christian Gospels. What the excavators had found was the entire life and culture of a flourishing market-town, encapsulated in its waste paper