On the Oxyrhynchus Papyri

A few days ago, I wrote about Narkissos and the (relatively late) introduction of his mythology. In it, I mentioned the Oxyrhynchus Papyri...and then discovered that a lot of you have never heard about it. Let's rectify that, shall we!

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are a group of texts that were discovered at Oxyrhynchus (known today as el-Bahnasa). The city of Oxyrhynchus (meaning ‘sharp-nosed’ in Greek) is located in the Minya Governorate in Upper Egypt, 160 km (99 mi) to the southwest of Cairo. This city lies on the Bahr Yussef (‘Canal of Joseph’), which is a branch of the Nile situated to the west of the main river. For over a millennium, the inhabitants of the city would throw away their rubbish in a number of sites in the desert beyond the city limits. Amongst these items were texts written on papyri that the people of Oxyrhynchus no longer wanted.

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri first came to light in the final years of the 19th century. In 1896, two British Egyptologists, Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt, chose to excavate at El-Bahnasa. One factor that influenced the two men to choose this city as their excavation site was its reputation as a key Christian center in ancient times. The two men were hoping that they would be able to find some interesting pieces of early Christian literature there. On January 11, 1897, a piece of papyrus with unknown Logia, or ‘Sayings of Jesus’ was brought to the surface (it would later be determined that this was the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas). Next was a leaf from the Gospel of Matthew, and then even more pieces of papyri. In three months, the men found enough papyri to fill 280 boxes.

Apart from early Christian literature, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri also contained numerous other types of works. For example, some of the papyri have been found to hold magical spells, texts used in everyday situations such as grocery lists, official records, business contracts, and personal correspondences. These papyri offer scholars a glimpse into the lives of the ancient inhabitants of Oxyrhynchus. In addition, pieces of ancient literature, which would otherwise have been completely lost, have been found amongst the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. Two of the most famous of these are a satyr play by Sophocles and poetry by Sappho.

This group of documents is seen as one of the most important discoveries when it comes to manuscripts because they have works of ancient literature that are not known to have survived anywhere else in the world. Whilst scholars have been hard at work transcribing the texts on the papyri found by Grenfell and Hunt, this undertaking is far from complete, and is still being carried out today.

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri Collection belongs mainly to the Egypt Exploration Society (apart from some personal items of Grenfell and Hunt), and is housed by Oxford University in its Sackler Library. The Society owns over 500,000 papyrus fragments, the largest collection of papyri in the world. The collection mainly comprises literary, documentary and other texts in Greek, dating from the third century BC to the seventh century AD, but also includes a few hundred texts each in Egyptian (hieroglyphic, hieratic, demotic, mostly Coptic), Latin and Arabic, and a very few in Hebrew and Aramaic, Syriac and Pahlavi. Most of these papyri come from the excavations of Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt at ancient Oxyrhynchus in 1896/7 and from 1903 to 1906/7.

Some of the Greek and Latin texts come from ancient village sites in the Fayyum and from the cemeteries of el-Hibeh where Grenfell and Hunt dug between 1895 and 1903, and from the 1913/14 excavations of John de M. Johnson at Antinoopolis. The Society also holds various records of the excavations and the distribution of the finds, including several hundred photographs taken by Hunt and Johnson.

The Sackler Library provides a room equipped for the restoration, photography and decipherment of the papyri. Work is also carried out at University College London and the Institute of Classical Studies of the University of London. In the earlier years some papyri were sent to the Cairo Museum after publication, and others were distributed to appropriate museums and educational institutions in Great Britain and the North America to encourage interest in papyrology, but now all published papyri are retained to facilitate future re-examination and the possible joining of fragments.

Financial support for the care and publication of the collection, which is designated as a British Academy Major Project, is currently provided by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy. The EES appoints a Management Committee to oversee the collection and its publication.

The collection website, POxy: Oxyrhynchus Online, provides digital images of most of the published papyri (except those which were distributed). These images are created by another project, ‘Imaging Papyri in Oxford’. Requests to reproduce the images require the approval both of the Imaging Papyri project and of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Management Committee.